The color of each state indicates how frequently you will find someone with this surname in each state. For instance, if a state is colored red, then 1 in 100 people (or more) in that state have the surname. Similarly, yellow means approximately 1 in 300 have the surname, green means 1 in 1000, and blue means 1 in 10,000 (or less).

If you want to save this map to your hard drive, click on it with your right mouse button. If you're using AOL, make sure you first set the "Members|Preferences|WWW|Uncompressed Graphics" option.

If you're like me, you have boxes and boxes of images, slides, and negatives that you never get around to organizing. I've produced a program that you can use to scan these images into a computer for eventual organizing and archiving on CD or DVD.

VueScan is a program that helps you rapidly scan large numbers of slides, negatives, and snapshots using most types of low-cost film scanners. VueScan is well suited to batch scanning, and also has features that let you restore colors of old, faded negatives, slides, and snapshots.

It doesn't cost anything to download and test VueScan and it only takes about 5 minutes to do this. If you don't already have a film scanner, I also have a list of a few recommended film scanners.