[OC] Top 10 US Surnames - frequency of appearance in newspapers Visualization

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] Top 10 US Surnames - frequency of appearance in newspapers" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on Greetings, all. Hoping that this is within the rules/guidelines of the community.

As a proof-of-concept exercise, our firm ran an analysis across decades of Census data, along with corresponding peeks at surnames appearing in newspapers over the past 125 years. What we found:

Three Hispanic surnames have surged in frequency in the United States, but their corresponding frequency in mentions in newspapers is generally weak -- substantially so.

You can check out the 5-page slide deck here: [2026\_03\_21\_Surname-PDF.pdf](https://a1nwsaebii5o6v6s6qcnwa98yha-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/greg_researchbiz_biz/IQA5JlXlf3TvSoC-NsGA4LX-ATSUeBuWgpCnRO4LqgtoWQs?e=bB8qjs)

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The Methodology:

Source for the surnames was a US Census website page, "Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census".

To keep the newspaper data clean, we had to get creative. Searching for a name like "Brown" on the Ancestry/Newspapers website might pull up "brown sugar" or "brown the meat". We also noticed that searching for "Mr. \[Surname\]" (which also retrieves "Mrs. \[Surname\]") showed a big decline across the board after the year 2000 -- likely because modern journalism has moved away from using titles of address to identify people.

We shifted the search phrase to "\[Surname\] family". This helped ensure the capture of mentions of people.

What the Charts Show:

Share of Voice -- we calculated the "percentage of the sample" for each surname per decade to see how their relative share of news mentions has shifted over time. On the logarithmic scale, you more easily can see the exponential growth in mentions of surnames like Garcia, Rodriguez, and Martinez starting in the later-20th century. Interestingly, there is a clear gap between actual Census population percentages in 2010 and newspaper coverage in 2010 for certain surnames -- downward for each of the Latino ones., which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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