Ancestry - Discover the meaning behind your last name

[Katie Bee]

I received the Ancestry email today asking me to Discover the meaning behind your last name

I did a search for my maiden name and found the information provided was inconsistant.
Ancestry said that for 1891 there were 1,025 of my named families living in Durham. This was about 37% of all the recorded in the UK. Durham had the highest population of my named families in 1891.
The associated map said there were 0 - zero families in Durham.

In scotland in 1881, they said that the majority of my family name lived in Aberdeenshire - could I found Aberdeenshire on the map? They had moved it to Wigtownshire and named the true Aberdeenshire as Wigtownshire!
So now I do not know if I should believe the shaded county on the map or the wording.

The wording of UK appears to mean England and Wales.

I have raised a query with them and will see what they say.

 

[Katie Bee]

I have had a reply from Ancestry agreeing with the errors that I found.
They have reported the issues to their programmers.

Since then I have found more issues with the search results.
In some cases it said there were more than 100% of my familes living in certain areas.
There were 12 out of 7 of my families living in one Scottish county in 1891, 171%
I think the programmers need to test their programs better!

The results are interesting, but beware of all the errors.