It was my great pleasure to spend the weekend in Tyrone, PA as part of the Irish Heritage Festival. I had been invited by the Tyrone Area Historical Society to do a program, so I put together a little information on the most common local names. And to compile that list, I read the phone book.

The two best sources for a quick glimpse into a place are the phone book and the cemetery. Between these two, you can get a pretty good idea of who lives (and lived) in a community. I've spent lots of time in cemeteries around Central PA, but this was my first real, in-depth excursion into the phone book.

I scanned the book and made a list of names that were listed more than 10 times. I counted how many times a name was listed, then ranked the names in order of frequency. Of the 1204 names, Smith was the most common here; no surprise, because that is also the most common name in the United States, according to the 2000 Census.

I added a little research into the origin of those 1204 names. Now for me, this is my kind of project. Lots of data to mess with, lots of new tidbits to learn. That alone is satisfying to me. At one point, though, it even became too geeky for me. I was working on my desktop computer when I needed info that was on the notebook computer, so I opened it on my desk. Then I was trying to put together a slide program that would run on another notebook computer, so I put that on the other side of the desk. Between keyboards, I struggled to keep a couple of books propped open. Suddenly, as I sat there happily bopping between glowing screens and bright pages, I had one of those stop-and-look-at-what-you're-doing moments. Always striving to not take myself too seriously, it cracked me up.

The real payoff came over the weekend when I got to share what I'd learned with the folks who came to the Tyrone History Museum. Knowing that my phone book method had left a lot of local names off my list, I also logged onto the Internet and took advantage of some online resources in the hope that everybody who stopped by could discover something about their name. It worked!

I always enjoy being part of the discovery process, especially like this, where the discovery was a very personal experience for the folks who stopped by. I was thrilled by the number of young people who wanted to learn; they got really excited with every little bit of info that we teased out of the data.

The Tyrone Area Historical Society can be commended for a great event. Members of the Blair County Genealogical Society and a local author of a book about Tyrone were also there. Visitors were also encouraged to explore the exhibits in the museum.

I think between us we helped a few more people discover that this history thing is a hoot!