Geographers at University College London (UCL) have set up a site that will plot where all the people that have your surname are living.

The site, publicprofiler.org/worldnames, was launched over the weekend and it can find where the names of most people in the English-speaking world live. The idea is to provide a tool for tracing family history and also a powerful aid for governments to keep track of intra-national and international migrations.

UCL said the site has a database that holds 300 million names of people in 26 countries, representing a population of about a billion, or nearly a sixth of the world. It contains 10.8 million individual surnames and 6.5 million forenames, and can pick out which of the are most closely associated with the former.

Currently the site looks after English speaking countries the best, but it can also do  Japan, India and Argentina, although much of the rest of the globe, including Africa, is so far untouched.

When we popped in for a look we found that the name Farrell kept crashing the database. Either we are as common as muck, or it is based on Apple software.