Two families of the same name challenge. I can't find a connection.

[Braytons]

This is handy to check distribution of surnames:
http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/
(it is giving me an error message at the moment though).

You could look for the surname on a census or two to see how many results you get. You could try various searches such as exact spelling, surname in one or both locations etc.

It is possible that there were variations in the spelling of the surname.

Could be a co-incidence of surnames or maybe the connection goes further back than you are able to trace. 

GBNames has been offline for at least a month , I emailed but got an error from the email server too - it appears to be run by some people from UCL.

Thank you.  What a shame its not working.  I used it quite a lot.   

Braytons

[melba_schmelba]

This is handy to check distribution of surnames:
http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/
(it is giving me an error message at the moment though).

You could look for the surname on a census or two to see how many results you get. You could try various searches such as exact spelling, surname in one or both locations etc.

It is possible that there were variations in the spelling of the surname.

Could be a co-incidence of surnames or maybe the connection goes further back than you are able to trace. 

GBNames has been offline for at least a month , I emailed but got an error from the email server too - it appears to be run by some people from UCL.

Thank you.  What a shame its not working.  I used it quite a lot.   

Braytons

There is some contact details for Paul Longley, one of the academics involved in the project here (can't find other ones), it's possible they don't know the website servers are not working if people only tried to email through the same server

http://paul-longley.com/contact/

http://www.publicprofiler.org/contact.php

[Gadget]

If you put his name plus UCL into Google, his contact details will come up.

Have removed them from this post,  just  in case.

[Ruskie]

It seems to be intermittently working/broken. I used it a day or two ago, a couple of weeks ago it was not working, and now again. 

[Rena]

This is a question really of statistics.  What do you think the chances of two families with the same surname, born in Cambridge and Norfolk respectively are related?  I have spent weeks trying to find a connection.  I have a dna match via Ancestry to one family.

Do you think that it's a just coincidence of names? 

Is there somewhere I can discover the frequency of the surname Mayes?

Thank you all. 

Braytons

Enter the surname on this forebears web page and it will show you the distribution in the UK - it certainly looks like an east Anglian surname.

https://forebears.io/

This old website (below) giving information about Norfolk lists over 700 "Mayes" bmd's.  However, due to spelling variants it's also listed as "Mase" and probably there are other spellings as well.

http://www.doun.org/transcriptions/surnames.php?letter=M

My grandfather was born in Cambridgeshire 1880s, in early 1900s he travelled up to Yorkshire for seasonal work. His parents were both born and bred in Norfolk but travelled down to Cambridgesire looking for work, where they settled and where all their children were born. On the other hand his father's oldest brother moved to the Midlands in the 1800s for work.  In Norfolk the family surname was "Shearen"; this surname travelled to the Midlands but the dialect defeated the Cambridgeshire enumerator who heard "Sharring" and this eventually became "Shearing"