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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of funny, my surname actually does have a huge cluster around my hometown, but my paternal grandfather I inherited that name from was from another part of Germany and only moved here in the 1940s.

One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren't, but his great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).

Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But wait, there's more: He also was in the same line of work as my father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately, that would have freaked my out in a big way.

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Reminds me of a scare I had when I was dating my now wife. We were discussing our families and turns out our mothers had the same first name... and their maiden surnames were the same. It's a fairly common Irish name and there was no traceable relation but talk about a potential freakout! Made for a great bit during my father-in-law's speech at our wedding.

In the part of Scotland I come from there was a distinct lack of variation in surnames - so much so that people would use so-called "tee-names" to identify different families

e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":

http://www.pirieonline.uk/history/PFWv1-o/p1444.htm

I'm glad it worked out for you. It is a funny story, though, so don't be mad at me for chuckling a little bit. (I guess the guests at your wedding did so, too.)

A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two women who had not only the same first name but also worked at the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been both funny and confusing.

When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having two employees with the same name drives me a little bit crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is just wrong.)

our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees

As someone with a common first name and common surname, this drives me bananas.

I still get emails from my graduate university to email: first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of 50k students, and have to reply that I've had that email for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very common name.

I have to admit I found the very concept of using a value that could change as a primary repulsive from an aesthetic point of view. It's just bad database design.

Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was that it made life more complicated for me. But email adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did not have two employees with the same name, so first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.

"Wait a minute...my dad's name is Leo Varadkar too...Mom!?!?!?"

Sounds like another (anecdotal) data point for nominative determinism:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180404-do-our-names-p...

Those are two people from a group of at least several hundred. I'm not sure that's strong evidence. I count it as one those weird coincidences that make life interesting.

Of course, they might be a lot more insurance agents with my surname, but I wouldn't know one way or the other. Also, I like weird coincidences, so I'm rather biased.

That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. I just don't have enough data to support your idea.

Years ago I was in my ancestral village and met a man (with same very distinctive family name) countless generations removed who looked exactly like my grandfather. Even the same physical, stocky build... and yeah, I had to just kind of mind my manners because it was super surreal. Guess it's kinda like the Old Spice commercials - if your granddad wasn't good looking you wouldn't be here?

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