Updated in 2023: I am sorry to say that the original HowManyOfMe.com website has gone down. I can’t find any evidence of its return. Rumor has it that a Jeopardy contestant mentioned this site, and the ensuing web-traffic was more than the site creator could endure. This unfortunate phenomenon has been called the Slashdot Effect or the Hug of Death.
Updated in 2026: Some clones of HowManyOfMe have been created over the years, but most disappoint. I’m taking down links to those sites, as they have either become overrun with malicious ads, or return junk results with no basis in fact. However…
namestrace has developed a variety of tools, that does appear to strive for accuracy. If you use their “How many people have my name?” tool, it cross-references census data and birth records and gives you a proper estimate of a name’s occurrence. It’s quick and rather elegant, so I recommend you check it out, as well as the rest of what the website offers!
Originally posted in 2021: HowManyOfMe.com will tell you the frequency of occurrence for any name in the USA. Type in a name and it will report how many people in the US have that first name. Or a particular last name. Or even a combination of both names.
HowManyOfMe.com might just be a quick bit of entertainment. It boggles my mind to see that there are 85 other people in the states with my full name. But I can also see this being a useful tool for someone choosing a stage name or pseudonym.
Bummer. My name is Marshall Devine II. My father passed recently, and prior to that there were seven people living in America sharing my name. I was curious to see if that number had dropped by one since my father’s death.
My condolences, Marshall.
I remember using the original howmanyofme.com years ago — it was such a cool idea! I was disappointed when it went offline, but I actually found (and later built) a new version that works the same way.
You can check it out here: https://howmanyofmes.com
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It does exactly what the old site did — tells you how many people share your name in the U.S. based on census data
Hm, I’m not sure it works “exactly” as the old site did. As I test it, it seems to return random numbers. I highly doubt that there arer 320,831 “Elon Musk”s in the country. Or 721,525 “Donald Trump”s. Or 295,712 “Hieronymus Bosch”s.
But good luck with the site, and I will re-test it in the future to see how it’s doing!