There Are Three of Me
While reading a Book of Odds essay on the frequency of various last names in the United States, I came across a link to a fun site called “How Many of Me?” If you enter your name, the site will search U.S. Census Bureau data to figure out how many people have your first name, how many people have your last name, and how many people share your full name.
Turns out there 69,225 people named Wade in the U.S.; it’s the 664th most popular first name. (That’s more popular than I would have thought.) There are 12,511 Roushes in the U.S.; it’s the 3,028th most common surname.
So how many Americans are there named Wade Roush? Three, it turns out.
I already knew about one: he’s a realtor in Atlanta, GA, who beat me to registering the domain www.waderoush.com. Happily, I beat my Atlanta rival in the Google rankings—if you search for Wade Roush there, 38 of the first 40 results are about me.
I don’t know who the third Wade Roush is—if you happen to come across him, let me know.
In the funny-name-coincidences department, I also recently learned about someone named Wade Rouse. He’s an author who lives in Saugatuck, MI, and recently published a humorous memoir called At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream. I found out about him when a friend of my mother’s heard an NPR radio interview with him, thought it was me, and sent me a congratulatory note—which puzzled me greatly until I did a bit of digging.
