The Top Ten "Medeiros" States

Where is Everyone?

Some folks have expressed surprise at the number of folks from Hawaii that are on the list. This is partly because I live in Hawaii, but also because, generally speaking, there are a lot of Portuguese people in Hawaii.

But how does Hawaii compare to other states in the U.S.? One of my co-workers, Walle Landenberger, came up with an interesting approach to answer this question; and that is, to do a search of the telephone listings for each State. With the advent of internet websites such as American Directory Assistance, this has become a much simpler task. So, here is a list of the Top Ten "Medeiros" States and a table showing the relative distribution of people named Medeiros within the United States.

So, how about Canada. eh?

Helena mentioned in an e-mail that there is a very large Portuguese community in Canada (mainly Toronto) with the surname Medeiros . This sentiment was echoed by Tony who is also at the University of Toronto. Tony suggested making the "Top Ten Medeiros States" into the top ten provinces/states in North America. He's sure Ontario would rank right up there!

Curiousity got the best of me, so I started checking around the internet. The source I had used for my previous research, American Directory Assistance (also called LookupUSA) didn't have any listings for Canada, so I checked Yahoo's listings of telephone resources. I found several potential sources. However, after checking them out, I found that some, like InfoSpace, do not give you the total number of hits (and my sense was Ontario could have many hundred listings). Other sources, like Canada411 and the WorldPages, have a limit on the number of hits returned (again, this could pose a problem when trying to get an accurate count for a particularly "Medeiros-rich" province).

I did find out some information, Canada411 shows 250 Medeiros listings in Quebec and 93 in British Columbia. However, Ontario maxes out their system at 500 hits. Moreover, for some reason, Canada411 doesn't have any information for Alberta as yet. So, I really don't have enough information to include a table for Canada. But I'll keep looking.

And now, without further ado, here's...