The Family Number

The Birth Last Name number is the third of the name-part totals, found by summing the Pythagorean letter values of the surname and reducing. Because the surname is inherited, numerologists read this total as the ancestral or family contribution to the self, the traits, tendencies and inheritance shared with those who bear the same name, the ground on which the more individual first and middle numbers stand. It is the one name-part number that a whole family holds in common, which is why it is read as the collective rather than the personal note within the name.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers and Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered both carried Balliett's 1908 name-total method forward into wider circulation, but it is the ancestral, family reading of the surname specifically that later popular writers leaned on hardest, since a total shared by everyone who carries a name lends itself more readily than a private first or middle name to claims about family character and inherited traits. Multi-part and hyphenated surnames, increasingly common in blended and dual-heritage families since the late twentieth century, pose a genuine and openly acknowledged difficulty for this total, since the system's founding authors worked in an era when a single, stable family surname was the near-universal norm the chart was built to fit.