'whut?' ancestral names in your lineage

when I was a kid I was struck by how rare my surname (O' Dowd or just Dowd with dropped O) was in England but then when I went back to the motherland every summer it was almost as common as Smith over there. I remember looking it up in the phone book and we were the only Dowd's in Hudds despite it having a big Irish presence and thinking it is probably more of an indictment on the family name than signalling that we are unique in some way! Anyway I find the idea of doing self genealogy absolutely abhorrent when you go past the parents of dead family, who gives a flying fuck what any of them did. it's quite safe to conclude that most of them were complete fucking arseholes whether they gained some peripheral historical respectability at some point or not is my blazing hot take on this!

Some good French-Canadian names on my mom's side:

Hermine Spenard
Rosalie Cayouette
Eustache Beaupre
Cyrille Thibeau
Domithilde Filion
Narcisse Boudreau

My mom's uncle traced one line all the way back to a 16th-century Frenchman named Nicolas Bonhomme.

no doubt a very cold and aloof character!