One of the fun things about owning the leppik.net domain name is the occasional out-of-the-blue email. Like last week when a woman from Wales wrote to say that she shares my last name.

I got a similar message last year from another Leppik. What makes this all the more interesting is that, aside from these occasional blips, nearly all the Leppiks in America are my immediate relatives. For example, Yahoo’s white pages has six listings for Leppik, five of which are me, my parents, or my siblings.

Leppiks are most common in Estonia, although the typical spelling there is Lepik. My grandparents added the second p to make it easier to spell when they got to America. Not that it helps much.