Can you provide some more information about the information you're retrieving? Can the same person appear more than once in another table?

Um, yes..
Within the people table they are unique but within the item type tables, they could have multiple items associated to them..

people
uniqueUSer | uniqueID | details
--------------------------------------
Bob | 2 | from SoCal

item table 1

itemID | itemName | ownerUniqueID
----------------------------------------
12345678 | best thing | 2
32165487 | another thing | 2
12345678 | something | 1
32165487 | another | 4

So you want to
A) count the total number of matching rows across all the linked tables (e.g., 2 for table1 for Bob), or
B) count the number of tables where there are matching rows (e.g., 1 for table1 for Bob)?

Choice A:.. I want to say

name has # total(# in each table)
----------------------
Jack has 11 total (5,3,2,1)
Bob has 9 total (1,4,3,2)
Jan has 7 total (3,2,2,0)
Sue has 5 total (2,1,0,2)

Ah, then you'll want to try something like:

SELECT people.uniqueID, SUM(a.Items) AS TotalCount
FROM people LEFT OUTER JOIN
(SELECT uniqueID, COUNT(*) AS Items
FROM ItemTable1
GROUP BY uniqueID
UNION
SELECT uniqueID, COUNT(*) AS Items
FROM ItemTable2
GROUP BY uniqueID
UNION
SELECT uniqueID, COUNT(*) AS Items
FROM ItemTable3
GROUP BY uniqueID
UNION
SELECT uniqueID, COUNT(*) AS Items
FROM ItemTable4
GROUP BY uniqueID) a ON people.uniqueID=a.uniqueID
GROUP BY people.uniqueID
ORDER BY TotalCount DESC

You'll probably need to do some tweaking- you may not get exactly what you're looking for if you have any NULL values.

wow. I have no words.