What Are the Most Common Last Names in Wisconsin?

With all the Petersons, Andersons, and Johnsons around the Badger State, what last names are the most common in Wisconsin? How common are those last names compared to the overall population of the state? 

Utilizing a series of data points like birth, marriage, and death information from around the state, the website Forebears.io lists Johnson as the top surname in Wisconsin. This is followed by Smith, which comes in at a somewhat distant second.

Of the 5.758 million people that live in Wisconsin, almost 46,000 have the last name Johnson. That works out to 1 in roughly every 127 people in the state having that surname. As far as Smith goes, almost 31,000 people have that last name. That means that about 1 in every 189 people has this last name.

According to Ancestry.com, Johnson is English and Scottish in origin. The name is patronymic from the personal name John. For Smith, Ancestry.com says it is also English in origin. It is an occupational name for a worker in metal, from Middle English smith (Old English smið, probably a derivative of smitan ‘to strike, hammer’). Ancestry.com goes on to explain that this is the most frequent of all American surnames.

Here is the listing of the top 30 last names in Wisconsin, according to forebears.io:

1. Johnson
2. Smith
3. Anderson
4. Miller
5. Olson
6. Nelson
7. Peterson
8. Brown
9. Williams
10. Jones
11. Schmidt
12. Schultz
13. Thompson
14. Davis
15. Martin
16. Larson
17. Meyer
18. Hanson
19. Krueger
20. Hansen
21. Wilson
22. Mueller
23. Lee
24. Schroeder
25. Clark
26. Thomas
27. Wagner
28. Schneider
29. Taylor
30. Weber