Spelling Variations

I have often been asked about the number of variations of the name Ramaley and so I developed a table of variations from my own data base.

I have roughly 11,000 descendants of the immigrant Ambrose Remeli and of those there are 4063 surnamed with some variation of Ramaley. These are not all living; by my estimate there should be about 3000 living today. I also follow the two-syllable "Remly" and "Remley" families although we have never been able to tie them into the immigant Ambrose.

Here it is:

Surname	Male	Fem	Total
Ramale	10	8	18
Ramaley	286	234	520
Ramalia	17	11	28
Ramalie	14	8	22
Ramaly	20	12	32
Ramele	0	1	1
Rameley	1	0	1
Rameli	1	0	1
Ramelig	0	4	4
Rameli	1	1	2
Ramely	1	1	2
Ramulia	0	2	2
Raymaley	22	27	49
Remailia	1	0	1
Remaily	17	14	31
Remala	0	1	1
Remale	2	0	2
Remaley	856	962	1818
ReMalia	6	3	9
Remalia	36	32	68
Remalie	8	8	16
Remally	2	0	2
Remaly	507	508	1015
Remealich	0	1	1
Remehli	0	1	1
Remelah	1	0	1
Remelay	0	1	1
Remele	15	9	24
Remeleich	0	1	1
Remeley	2	7	9
Remeli	9	8	17
Remelie	1	0	1
Remely	167	178	345
Remilly	1	0	1
Remily	4	7	11
Rhemaly	1	3	4
Rimeley	1	0	1
Remley	158	152	310
Remly	45	43	88

Another question that was recently asked had to do with the probability of a chance encounter with a Ramaley descendant. That is, given some group of "random" people, what are the odds that two (or more) are Ramaley descendants?

Because there are "pockets" of Ramaleys (e.g., Lehigh County or Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania, Ramsey County in Minnesota, Tippecanoe County in Indiana, etc.) the odds would certainly be different in different places. Even here in the Gettysburg area there is a Ramaley (me), a Remaley in nearby Fairfield and I made a chance encounter in a downtown store with a person whose mother was a Remaley.

But having a lack of data never stopped a mathematician and since there are roughly 3000 people surnamed with some variation of the name, and there are about 300 million people in the US, we represent about .001% of the population (1 in 100,000).

However, this just accounts for people surnamed Ramaley. Since most people would recognize a surname of a grandparent, or a spouse, or an in-law, one might estimate that roughly 1 in 10,000 people would have a Ramaley in their near family and should recognize the name.

So, roughly, every time you encounter another 10,000 people there should be someone who would recognize the name as a near-relative. Depending on your lifestyle, encountering 10,000 people might take a month or it might take a year.

Of course, just encountering someone who would recognize the name doesn't insure that you actually make the connection since most of us don't advertise our name as we go through life. Sure there are occasions in which people have name tags or in which our name is published or announced, but most of the time that is not the case.

So what is the "bottom line."

Based upon the anecdotes I have heard, the encountering and recognizing of the name is reasonably rare -- perhaps any given Ramaley will "accidentally" run into another Ramaley only once or twice in a lifetime. I run into a lot more but that is because I actively seek relatives.

I would be interested in hearing from others about this.