You may be wondering what the purpose of this seemingly randomly coloured map is. Well, it’s from a website which allows you to show the distribution of your family name from the 1998 and 1881 censuses. There’s no data for ‘Rickard’ in the 1881 census, presumeably because Rickard is a fairly recent veriation on the name Richard. I’m guessing it probably started outside of the UK, and came back over time. As you can see from the graphic (Yellow is low, through to Purple being high numbers), we’re mostly in the Southern parts of the UK. I was a little surprised to see so many in Northern Wales. Still, it’s fairly interesting.