Last name database?

[jassing]

Years ago I attended a conference in new york (state) regarding better name-matching algorithms. (ie: soundex, etc, but tuned to names)

The result of the conference was a long boring document outlining the process. It proved to be very good at matching up names when the exact spelling wasn't known.

At the time I worked for a government agency where I was able to run massive tests on names from the databases.

A friend recently called and asked me if I still had the specs, and would I write a dll. (Old code was in cobol and then vfp)

I have written said dll and now need to test it -- on some manual tests, it looks like it was coded properly, but i would like to run a larger test to make sure there aren't anomolies.

does anyone have a large database of last names I could use to test? I don't need any other fields, just the last name.

[Demivec]

Here's a link to a text file with the surnames from the USA Census for 2000. The file has all of the surnames from the census (151,671 names).

[jassing]

Here's a link to a text file with the surnames from the USA Census for 2000. The file has all of the surnames from the census (151,671 names).

Nice, thanks!