How many and where ?

How many Caveys are we in the World, and where are we living ? This is an important subject of thought for the whole family. And this is an important contribution to The Debate : if there is no Caveys in Ireland, the way of Irish roots looks like a dead end...

My first idea was to go to the Central Post Office in Paris where I had the opportunity, more than ten years ago, to have a look on some phone directories of foreign countries such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and so on. Alas, when I go back in the middle of November 1997, I have been told that the service has been suppressed since a lot of years.

Another way, I have not explored yet, is to go to the embassy of the countries I need to explore the phone books (I shall go there one day).

But, because this site is a Web one, I got the idea to explore the White pages with the tools provided on the Internet. So do I from November 15 to December 15, 1997.

By another way, I also had the idea to send messages to the newsgroups devoted to genealogy. I especially mailed to news:soc.genealogy.ireland and news:soc.genealogy.britain.

Here is the result of my research for now. I give you the information "as is" because I believe that it needs to be deepened in the future. And I am also conscious that I cannot do it by my self without your help.

Before walking trough the work I have done this four weeks, you have to consider the following :

The tools provided on the Web to research about a last name via the phone number are numerous : the first one is InfoSpace, but there is also Whites pages, or Yahoo white pages for example.

Keep in mind that :

1. Those who are "red listed" (or "unlisted") do not appear on the pages.
2. I am not sure that the listings on the Web are updated in "real time". For example, when I ask for a news groups member to search for Caveys in a city in the paper version of the White Pages, I frequently find differences with the result of my own research on the Web. 
3. Consequently, the census may be false especially when there are few Caveys in a state. Here is an example : if I found one Cavey in a state and if there are two, the digits below are 100 % false ! And if I found no Cavey but there is one, the result is infinity % false !
4. I asked to the Webmaster of InfoSpace : "How do you fill your data bases ? Did people have to register themselves or did you pickup the information directly from the white pages of the phone directories ?". The Webmaster answer me : "We obtain our data (for The United States and Canada) for the White pages from PRO CD. And we update a few times a year from PRO CD".
5. Some Cavey appears more the once. For example, I found a S. J.Cavey at Glenfield Leicester (U.K.) who is quoted four times at the same address but with four different phone numbers !
6. What is important is not the exact number of Caveys in a place : it is the scale of size. It does not matter if there is 177 caveys in Maryland or 178. The fact is that there is around 42 % of U.S. Caveys living in this state.
7. An other think you have to look for is that the White pages in U.S.A. and Canada are classified by state when they are not by county in Europe : I have found 99 Caveys in United Kingdom (using InfoSpace) but they are classified by alphabetical order... This is not a way to simplify our research about Caveys living (if any) in Northern Ireland !

As I wrote at the begging of this page, I give you my collect "as is". It is true regarding the roots of our query. It is also true regarding the design of the following pages. I am not very enthusiastic about the look and feel of the "How many pages". I shall try to do better an other day (I have in mind to draw maps with the number of  known Caveys upon them). What is important for now is to give you some subject of thought for the year 1998 so that you have some new and good idea to send to the other members of Caveys' Family World Wide Society...

When I had collected a lot of information (but before I ended, if there is a end, a day), I send a message to Dan Cavey. Here is his first conclusion.
(Note that Dan has not the whole result of my research when he wrote the following lines. Especially, I found 5 Caveys in Dublin with InfoSpace while soc.genealogy.ireland members do not find any one !) :

"99 in England, 99 in France, 38 in Belgium, 6 in Ireland, 20 in Canada, 12 in Australia, 262 in USA and a few everywhere else. (of course there could be another 500 FEMALE cousins who took another name!) That's 536 Cavey surname families that you have found in the world. That's not very many, we should be able to connect all of our cousins together!

Here's a fun estimate: Add 500 female cousin's families and you have about 1000 families of Cavey decedents. Add 2 offspring per family to the Cavey descendent parent of the 1000 Cavey families and you get 3000 living Caveys in the World! I'll bet that number is pretty close.

Next step is to contact those 6 Irish Caveys and see if any of them know how we got to America or how they got to Ireland from France!?"

I agree with this point of view.

Let's see the figures :

Ron. G. Kitchenn, one of my more ancient reader and a co-author of this site for Australia send me some information about Melbourne area (See Caveys in Australia and Caveys in New-Zealand).

I am impatient to hear from you but at the moment I am not far from thinking that the Caveys from Quebec have French roots while Caveys from elsewhere have English ones... It is up to you now...

As I have related it in "How the story began", a way we used to retrieve our roots was to browse across the telephone directories in order to be able to contact others Caveys. Because we have, in France, an exhaustive electronic telephone directory (known as "Minitel") it was relatively easy to search for Caveys. I don't know how its works in other countries, but in France, when you decide to subscribe for a telephone, your name is automatically entered in the directory unless you hear to the contrary. So you have not to register to be listed as you must do for the yellow pages on the Web.

This electronic white pages is very useful to search for a name. So do I in 1990 and in 1997. Here is the result of these researches.

Of course, you must keep in mind that :

The numbers given here are classified by area, then in decreasing order of importance into the country according to the census I have done in 1990.

[Note of the Editor] Since I have written the above text, thinks have changed and, for year 2006 , I have used the yellow pages on the Web.

By an other hand, I send an S.O.S. to the soc.genalogy.ireland, asking for the members if they could sold me their old phones directories. Here are the reply I received (decreasing order of dates) :

From Ted Morrissey (Dublin - Ireland), Sun, 28 December 1997 :

Looking at the current Greater Dublin phone directory, I see there are FOUR entries (for Cavey).

From Ollie Keenaghan (Cork - Ireland), Sun, 16 November 1997 :

If you have not received a copy I could send you one. There is, of course, a problem for the past number of years the telephone directory has been split up and now there are 6/7 volumes and I presume you require the full directory !.

However the full version is available on CD for approx IR£25. If you want any more info please let me know.

From Ted Morrissey (Dublin - Ireland), Fri, 14 November 1997 :

If you are going to use the Irish phone directories a lot, you might consider buying the CD-rom version that was published earlier this year. It covers the whole of the Irish Telecom service. The old books are now 6 or 7 in number and would be expensive to send by post - as well as being out-of-date. The CD-rom would be much better to look-up names etc. If you are interested, I can find out where to buy -- I think it costs about IR£22.

From Susan Westbrook (U.S.A. - Virginia), Mon, 10 November 1997 :

Dear Jean-Luc, I have looked through all six phone books and there is not ONE Cavey listed. This may be a good thing because you can now concentrate on Northern Ireland.Sorry I couldn't help.

From Patricia L Kostelnik (Ireland), Mon, 10 November 1997 :

Hi, I won't give up my 1994 Irish Phone Book for anything, but I can tell you that the CAVEY name does not appear in the "04 Area" phone book for Ireland in 1994.

From Susan Westbrook (U.S.A. - Virginia), Mon, 10 November 1997 :

There are six telephone books for Ireland (excluding Northern Ireland : see U.K. below ). I have 1997 editions of all of them and will be happy to mail you photocopied pages for any surname.

John E. Wynn, a member of soc.genealogy.britain, wrote to me that he found only one Cavey in Northern Ireland, not at Belfast but at Greenisland, CARRICKFERGUS, Co Antrim. An other one, Ed Barron, wrote that he also found one Cavey, but at ... Bealfast [UK-Info CD-ROM by looking for entries under Belfast (only)].

I have found 99 Caveys in U.K. (including Northern Ireland). Unfortunately, the names are classified by alphabetical order, not by city or by county. The result is that I have non way to draw a table of the names.

However, I have got some information via the news groups "soc.genealogy.britain" .

Since then, Collin Stenvenson has provided us with usefull information about the Caveys from UK BT Directory

Note :

• I am not very confident in the figures from BT directory because I have got Cavey from a county while searching for Cavey in an other County. Also people may be quoted twice (if they have two phone numbers at the same address).
• Figures for 1999 are those provided by Collin and include Cavey and Cavie which is not the case for the figures for 2006.

From the above figures it appears that the Cavey in UK are definitively from England and especially the south of London.

Pay attention to this:

What is important is to know that there is around 177 Caveys in Maryland that is more than in the rest of the United States. What is important is that around 314 Caveys live in seven states when there is around 413 Caveys in the entire U.S.A.(76 %). What is important, too, is that, except for California and Florida (known to be the Eldorados of North America), the majority of the Caveys, in U.S.A. are living on the East Coast, in Maryland or the states around (Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania).

We have also to consider this statistics provided by Entisoft : "Cavey is the 32,264th most popular last name (surname) in the United States; frequency is 0.000%; percentile is 82.294 [SourceCBN]"

I am impatient to hear from you but at the present time I am not so far to think that all the Caveys in tis area have the same ancestor...

Sources. 1999 : Dan findings. 2006 : AnyWho online directory white pages.