5 of me
Tuesday October 31st 2006, 10:55 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

i’ve seen this little search engine on a handful of blogs in the past week, and decided to give it a whirl…

HowManyOfMe.com
Logo There are:
5
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

so, there are 5 people named mark oestreicher. i met one via email through an aol search years ago (when i had aol). we had several emails back and forth about what we do in life and how weird it was that we had the same name and everything, then found we really had nothing else to talk about. and i know there’s a doctor in new england with the name. he pops up in google searches. i’ve tried to figure out how to contact him (via email), but haven’t succeeded.

that leaves 2 more!

my father is an only son of immigrants from germany (my ‘oestreicher’ grandfather was the only one his line with that name to immigrate). and i’m an only son. so there are no other oestreichers in our extended family.

‘oestreicher’, btw, means austrian in german. my ‘oestreicher’ grandfather immegrated from the northern part of germany, though, which is nowhere near austria.

[update]
i completely doubt the veracity of this little search engine’s ability. i was showing it to my daughter liesl, and put her name in. i wasn’t suprised to see there were 0 “liesl oestreicher” matches. but it also said there were 0 people in the US with the first name liesl. any google search or xanga or facebook or myspace search will quickly prove otherwise.


5 Comments so far
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There are 0 people with my name in the US (including myself- they didn’t count me). and there are 63 people in the US with my full maiden name.

Comment by Jody 10.31.06 @ 11:06 am

fyi on the accuracy, it’s just a statistical thing not drawn from phone book databases.
they’ve got a page for it

Comment by stu mcgregor 10.31.06 @ 3:26 pm

Mark,

Are you familar with the independnet film, “Searching for Angela Shelton”? This woman named Angela Shelton decides to go across the country and meet in person all of the women who share her name and she interviews all of them about what their lives are like. She finds that our of the 40 women with that name, 28 have been molested, abused or raped. It’s a very powerful and telling film.

http://www.searchingforangelashelton.com/home.html

Comment by Jennifer 10.31.06 @ 4:33 pm

There are zero of me too… Do I exist? LOL

Actually - I know there’s another Jeff _______ - cuz his name was in the local paper the day I was born. Believe it or not - a guy with the same name as mine (and my last name is by far not a prominent name) lives just 15 minutes north of my hometown. There were barely 5 people in the phone book with the same last name as mine - and none with the same spelling…. yet this guy with the same first and last lived that close to me!

Comment by Jeff 11.01.06 @ 12:04 am

I thought Oestreicher would be German for King of the East. Perhaps reflecting the large number of noble families in the rather unsettled geography of Eastern Europe than any specifically regal connotations.

A British commedian called Dave Gorman made a TV series (and book) of finding other people with the same name. All the while he kept a log of how many miles he had to travel to find each one. Also well worth a look.

Comment by Daniel 11.01.06 @ 2:03 pm

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