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Map of Surnames in Europe

288 pointsby Nitroloabout 3 years ago

62 comments

jonenstabout 3 years ago
This website is overloaded with adds. It almost feels like a scam. Based on the fact that almost all other comments are not talking about it, I guess at least one of the following hypotheses is true (if not all of them): - most people here use an efficient addblocker - The website changed since its first appearance on the first page (maximize revenue?) - some comments are sponsored - on mobile it feels overwhelming but on desktops it's more bearable
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wazooxabout 3 years ago
Vaguely related amusing bit of trivia: the word for smith or blacksmith is one of the most common names about everywhere: Smith (England), Schmidt (Germany), Smit/Smet (Belgium, Netherlands), Fabre/Favre/Lefèvre/Lefèbvre (France), Ferrari/Fabri (Italy), Ferrero/Herrero (Spain), Ferreiro (Portugal), Kowalski (Poland), Haddad (Morocco), Demirci (Turkey), Demirdjian (Armenia), Gof/Goff/Le Goff (Brittany, Wales), Gowan/Gowen/Gow/Gough (Scotland), Kuznitz/Kuznetz/Kuznetzov (Russia), etc.
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melenaboijaabout 3 years ago
It is sad that most, if not all, of the databases don’t take into account accents and other phonetic signs. My last name is completely different with and without and accent. Actually in my case different languages, without accent is a Spanish last name and with the accent is Catalan.<p>That means that people like me have to keep record of our real names.<p>Also curious that databases have been one step backwards, in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies.
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tompagenet2about 3 years ago
Is this normalised at all? It always seems to look like a map of where cities are, although there are some interesting trends, especially if you pick surnames that have more recently become prevalent in a country.
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krylonabout 3 years ago
It&#x27;s kind of funny, my surname actually does have a huge cluster around my hometown, but my paternal grandfather I inherited that name from was from another part of Germany and only moved here in the 1940s.<p>One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren&#x27;t, but <i>his</i> great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).<p>Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But wait, there&#x27;s more: He also was in the same line of work as my father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately, that would have freaked my out in a big way.
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unfocusedabout 3 years ago
Very neat. My ancestors are not European, they are Lebanese, but I was able to find their last name in the countries they emigrated to long ago in Europe, and the cities make sense, although there&#x27;s more than I thought in certain countries!<p>For those interested, depending on where you live, you can access Ancestry.com through the Public Library for free. In Ottawa, that was case, although as of Jan. 1, 2022, you have to go in person. Through there, you can search by name or even place of origin, and you can see the immigration records. May of which even have the photos! I noted some people that went to Brazil and could see the entire person and his family. I&#x27;m sure many people don&#x27;t know that.<p>I was able to see my Grandfather&#x27;s record to Canada in 1925 New Brunswick, and my Great Uncle&#x27;s record in 1911 to Omaha, Nebraska. I&#x27;m also told my Great Grandfather came to the US in 1901, but I have been unable to track his record, because after having manually reviewed 1000+ records, I can tell you with confidence that spelling errors are rampant.<p>You had names change from say Smith, to Sally, and you can see the scratches as the records were modified. It&#x27;s hilarious! Also, they even misspell the names in the same record. So searching is very, very hard, and instead you have to put in a broad search, like city (which can also be misspelled), and then manually look through the records. The only thing that I can say that is pretty accurate is the year. So that should be your starting point.<p>Good luck!
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vanderZwanabout 3 years ago
I don&#x27;t know which dataset you&#x27;re using for the Netherlands, but it&#x27;s way off:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;netherlands&#x2F;index.php?sur=van+der+Zwan&amp;s=Search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;netherlands&#x2F;index.php?sur=van+der+...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbgfamilienamen.nl&#x2F;nfb&#x2F;detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaam=van%20der%20zwan&amp;gba_naam=van%20der%20Zwan&amp;nfd_naam=Zwan,%20van%20der&amp;operator=eq&amp;taal=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbgfamilienamen.nl&#x2F;nfb&#x2F;detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaa...</a><p>EDIT: actually, it works if I use &quot;vd Zwan&quot;, which is fine by itself, but that contradicts the instructions on top of the page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;netherlands&#x2F;nl&#x2F;index.php?sur=vd+zwan&amp;s=Zoeken" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;netherlands&#x2F;nl&#x2F;index.php?sur=vd+zw...</a>
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mazrabout 3 years ago
Oh yeah ! Onomastics (the study of names) is very cool ! And a nice data point to add to personalized data. I did a project with that a while ago to study discrimination in France (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namograph.antonomase.fr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namograph.antonomase.fr&#x2F;</a>) and it worked pretty well as long as you have large samples and stick to distributions comparisons.<p>Some nice use w.r.t. social mobility : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.fr&#x2F;Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Mobility-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00HNF5Z96&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.fr&#x2F;Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Mobility-ebook...</a><p>A good API to work with : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namsor.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namsor.app&#x2F;</a>
Bayartabout 3 years ago
It seems accurate, albeit a bit outdated, for my extremelly rare familly name (I know most of the people who bear it, and we&#x27;re still clustering around what I assume is our ancestral village), but the more common form of the same name is not in the database.
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ulzerajabout 3 years ago
Where is this data coming from? I have a rare Italian surname and this finder puts a very small circle (1-5) on the very region my grand grand father departed to America in 1895.
sublimefireabout 3 years ago
I&#x27;d love to see this done to something like Lithuania where surname ending differs among men, wives, girls (e.g. Tulas, Tuliene, Tulaite). Also, how do the compound names get dissected (e.g. Mary Scott-Doe)?
asimpletuneabout 3 years ago
Wow, I have a very uncommon Italian surname, and I was super surprised to see the results. The majority of my relatives were concentrated in where I know them to be, with a few outliers in the north and south.
utopcellabout 3 years ago
This site is misleading, tricking you into entering your name on an ad. Also one of the individual country&#x27;s input fields triggers Chrome&#x27;s CC popup.
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cpp_frogabout 3 years ago
Pretty accurate, at least for the 15 or so surnames I searched. All branches of my family, except one, come from Spain. I rearched most of the surnames and was able to get information on many (Basque, Castillian, Cantabric) and those roots are still reflected on this map. By that I mean they are most dense where they originated (some even 700 years ago), indepedent if they&#x27;re toponymic or not.
busyantabout 3 years ago
Would be cool if this were merged into a single map of Europe with a single search. You could get a sense of your &quot;surname diaspora.&quot;
frankfrankfrankabout 3 years ago
What I find rather depressing about these kinds of things is that they will be utterly useless to learn anything from going forward in just a few more generations, after the atrocity of forced integration and so called &quot;diversity&quot; will permanently and irrevocably muddle and pollute all cultures and people and societies all throughout the world.<p>We will soon no longer need to fight over ethnicity and race, because we will all be the same muddled and meaningless mass where the Ministry of Truth tells us that today the Italians are equally Indians, as Nigerians are Swedes.<p>The process is already quite advanced in the USA, where unique cultures, dialects, histories, cuisine, traditions, etc. that existed until rather recently, have been utterly shattered and deracinated and polluted through homogenization and corporatization of society, not to mention both sent into the memory hole and been rewritten a few times by now.<p>To see an even more extreme example of what the outcome of all this &quot;globalization&quot; and fraudulent &quot;diversity&quot; will be is to look to the ancestors of blacks in America that have suffering from the effects of being captured in war in Africa, sold into slavery, mixed together and torn apart socially, and shipped across an ocean where they were then traded and mixed and muddled wantonly just like &quot;diversity&quot; intends to do. They suffer from an acute absence and intentional destruction of what little culture and society they had. That is what the oligarchs of today have in store for all of us regular folks just like the oligarch plantation owners of the past perpetrated on humanity.<p>And don&#x27;t make the mistake if you think &quot;white people&quot; deserve the atrocity of &quot;diversity&quot; that has targeted them up to this point, it will invariably come for you and your culture and your society too, only there will be no one left and no moral argument to defend your culture then.
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goombacloudabout 3 years ago
Data is not clean, I doubt people have the surname &quot;Computer&quot; or &quot;Bahnhof&quot; (train station) in Germany
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benlumenabout 3 years ago
Maybe it&#x27;s my surname, but it just looks like a population map.
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meltedcapacitorabout 3 years ago
Nice.<p>Also the bloat-free implementation. Why can&#x27;t all websites be like this?
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tsujpabout 3 years ago
Neat, my surname which is Coppard has only 430 occurrences (by this datasets authority) in the UK.<p>It looks like if you query it directly on the map view here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;index.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;index.php</a><p>Then that shows you the &quot;Places&quot; count from the rankings list here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;most_common_surnames_ranking.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;most_common_surnames...</a><p>Should be good for others who don&#x27;t have a very common surname and didn&#x27;t find it in the (maximum) 10 pages of results.
Aidevahabout 3 years ago
This seems to have answered a longstanding question I had about French surnames. I had come across a presentation given by a person bearing the name &quot;La Rochefoucauld&quot; and I always wondered if she was descended from the eponymous noble family or related to the famous writer. This website tells me that in France the name &quot;La Rochefoucauld&quot; is uncommon but not rare so I guess the answer to that question is &quot;maybe&quot;.<p>I also searched for &quot;Monteverdi&quot; out of curiosity and the largest cluster bearing that name are in Lombardy centred around Cremona, which was indeed where the famous composer was born four and a half centuries ago.
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elausabout 3 years ago
Very interesting, especially for less popular or more regional names.<p>Would love to know more about how it&#x27;s done: What is the source of those mapping between names and geo locations? Public phone books to get the address and then some reverse geo-coding?
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emrebabout 3 years ago
Seems like a scam to collect credit card information from browsers that are not safe enough. When I click on the name field I get a message saying &quot;Automatic credit card filling is disabled because this form does not ...&quot;
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runxelabout 3 years ago
It works quite well, but bear in mind that the dataset must be already quite old. Based on my ancestors extremely rare name (only family in Germany) I would say at least 15 years old – but accurate for that matter!
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pixelbreakerabout 3 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;index.php?sur=hitler&amp;s=Search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surnamemap.eu&#x2F;unitedkingdom&#x2F;index.php?sur=hitler...</a>
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coward123about 3 years ago
Here&#x27;s what I thought was really great about this: My family originated in a European country not included in the list. In the 1600s (maybe even late 1500s) we took refuge in one of these countries that allowed a degree of religious tolerance in a specific area. Over the next century, many picked up and came to the new world.<p>Anyway, point being it was really neat to see my family name still in that very specific area, despite it being a name that would automatically stand out even today as &quot;not from around here.&quot;
Zobatabout 3 years ago
Anyone else found a surname with just 1 &quot;place&quot;?<p>Started looking av UK and tried a few I could think of. I&#x27;m from Sweden so I went for the obvious ones like Smith, Black, White and then just for laughs continued with colors (oops, that was UK so colours, i suppose). Went with Red, Blue and so on, was surprised by how many Pinks there were but then hit &quot;gold&quot; (1861 places) with Magenta, one place!
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k__about 3 years ago
My surename only shows up 100 times and only in a small part of Germany. I don&#x27;t even show up on that map at all.
spacemachineabout 3 years ago
Pretty uninspiring results for my surname.<p>Basically just looks like a population map. My surname isn&#x27;t especially common, but it is quite popular as a first name. So, there might be a high chance chance that a lot of displayed matches are false positives due to first names misinterpreted as surnames.
nimajnebabout 3 years ago
I thought my last name was a variation of an English last name. But apparently there&#x27;s ~15000 hits on the map for my last name and only ~1000 for the name I thought was original spelling. I think this is to blame with a very famous musician having the other spelling.
MarcScottabout 3 years ago
For the names I looked up in the UK, this might as well have been a map of population centres. Almost every surname was focused in London, Birmingham and Manchester. It&#x27;s to be expected, I suppose, but not very informative.
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lakkalabout 3 years ago
Neat. I just recently found an old letter pertaining to my great-great-grandfather selling a house in Germany prior to coming to the US in the 1880s or so. The town mentioned is the site of a cluster of his (uncommon) surname.
JaceLightningabout 3 years ago
Scam? I tapped the input field and all of my credit cards came up as options.
locallostabout 3 years ago
It would be interesting to see it on the EU level and for other countries (I understand finding the data is the hard part). There&#x27;s been a lot of migration and millions of people live outside of their countries.
eddyfromtheblokabout 3 years ago
wow, I found an enclave of my surname on a Catalan island! and in the south of the Netherlands, and over the border in Germany, which I expected.<p>also, I&#x27;m not seeing any ads using the Vivaldi browser.
londons_exploreabout 3 years ago
I&#x27;d like to see this as a coloured heatmap, normalized to the proportion of people in an area with a given surname...<p>Currently it&#x27;s just highlighting big cities for any surname I could think of.
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marcodiegoabout 3 years ago
For some reason it is lacking Portugal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapadesobrenomes.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapadesobrenomes.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>
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dustedabout 3 years ago
The most interactive thing about this seems to be the banner ads..
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wiz21cabout 3 years ago
How did they geolocate the surnames ? Mine is pretty unique in my country and it&#x27;s located in the town where I live. Where did they got this information from ?
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jollybeanabout 3 years ago
It ends up just being a population density map unfortunately.<p>Names are concentrated in cities, well we knew that. Would be nice to somehow normalise a bit for pop. density.
manuelabeledoabout 3 years ago
Nice. A bit out of date, though. I can find myself in there (I have a quite uncommon surname), but I haven&#x27;t been to my home country in half a decade.
Hubliumabout 3 years ago
For Austria:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namenskarten.lima-city.at&#x2F;de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namenskarten.lima-city.at&#x2F;de&#x2F;</a>
davidwabout 3 years ago
Searching for &quot;Smith&quot; in Italy turns up NATO base areas along with larger cities.<p>It&#x27;s really interesting to see how regional some names are.
ChildOfEruabout 3 years ago
Very fun; my grandfather came from the Isle of Jersey. The surname clusters around the Normandy area which makes sense.
ohplesabout 3 years ago
Doesn&#x27;t seem to like diacritics (ie accents)<p>Tried my name in France with&#x2F;without the accent.<p>Seems weird for a site related to Europe.
Scarblacabout 3 years ago
I doubt the accuracy -- my family and I don&#x27;t show up for the municipality I live in in the Netherlands.
huhtenbergabout 3 years ago
Not a single Dracula in Romania. Hmm.
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lvxferreabout 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve looked both of my surnames, as they&#x27;re fairly regional in Europe. Seems accurate.
donatjabout 3 years ago
I wish I could search the whole thing at once. My surname is pretty rare in general.
zfxfrabout 3 years ago
If you want to fill the map of France with red color then search for MARTIN.
brntabout 3 years ago
Where does it obtain data in countries without registries (such as France)?
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sjmm1989about 3 years ago
Lol. If I put my last name into UK&#x27;s map, the map basically turns red.
aosmithabout 3 years ago
What a dumpster fire of ads, how is this on the front page?
dhosekabout 3 years ago
The ad at the top looks too much like part of the site.
6510about 3 years ago
what great data mining tool, I watch my hands type every surname I know in order of familiarity. lol
liveoneggsabout 3 years ago
this website is an ad-riddles mess
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ubermanabout 3 years ago
seems like just a ad trap to me
pelasacoabout 3 years ago
Portugal isn&#x27;t Europe?
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neonnoodleabout 3 years ago
This map is &quot;&quot;fun&quot;&quot; if your family&#x2F;ancestry was affected by the Holocaust. I am of German ancestry, with one branch being Catholic and another branch Jewish. The Catholic surname is still abundant right in the region of origin, the Jewish surname(s) are, well, let&#x27;s just say they&#x27;re not there.
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theomegaabout 3 years ago
Related XKCD: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;</a><p>As the numbers are absolute, these maps are basically influenced by population densities.
roryabout 3 years ago
My name is common enough that it&#x27;s basically this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;</a>
karlerssabout 3 years ago
Basically just population maps - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1138&#x2F;</a>
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