Demo for Messin' with Texas: Deriving Mother's Maiden Names from Public Records

by Virgil Griffith and Markus Jakobsson

Published in RSA Cryptobytes 8(1), 2006

  1. Child's Last Name  
    Assumes groom will have the same last name as the child.


  2. Is Child Suffixed?  


  3. Child's Year of Birth  
    Assumes parents were married <= 6 years before the child was born.

    Alternatively, if you know in what year the parents married, use that instead:


  4. County in which Child was born  
    Assumes parents were married in the same county in which the child was born.


    5.

Jenna Bush? Barbara Bush? Jessica Simpson? Ciara? Ethan Hawke? Alex Jones? Julie Bell? Angie Harmon?
Caveat: For celebrities the father's firstname is often known, this makes derivation easier.

Searching 6,172,034 Texas marriage records across 254 counties from 1966-2002.

[ read the paper ]  [ get the records ]  [ see some other experiments from Indiana University ]