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Attwell

Attwell, also written Atwell. Attested in United States of America, Denmark, South Africa, borne by about 149 people in the registers this map holds.

Also written

A person linked these — Wikidata's «said to be the same as», or a family archive that worked it out from documents.

Atwell

Only sounds alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence.

AutwellAttewell

What Wikidata says this name is

Copied from Wikidata, not worked out here. It is crowd-sourced and wrong in places, which is why the item is linked below rather than the claim simply repeated.

  • English the language of the name

    Which is not where a family is from. A Polish surname can be borne by people whose forebears never saw Poland, and often is.

  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q758259 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Atwell, AtwellAtwell — 1Atwell — 8,926
Where those places are. A dot is a settlement whose name is this surname, sized by its population — not a claim that anybody of the name lives there. Phonetic neighbours are listed below but not drawn: putting a machine's guess on the ground would dress it up as geography.

This is as close to an origin as this map will go. A surname that is also a place name often came from it — and often did not: plenty are occupations or patronymics that happen to collide with a place, and plenty of places are named after a family rather than the other way round. It is a fact with a source, which is more than an etymology page offers.

  • Atwell Australia pop. 8,926 a spelling of the name
  • Atwell United States of America a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: United States of America, Denmark, South AfricaDenmark — attested, not countedSouth Africa — attested, not countedUnited States of America — 149 people
A dot is a country, not a place. It sits at the country's centre because a national register counts a country; nothing here says where in it these people are. A hollow ring is attested but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each, and a family archive finds a name without counting heads. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 3 countries where the eleven registers and eight archives behind this atlas attest the name. Most of the world has no surname register this project can read, and the ones that do and will not are listed with the reason.

Country by country

Each country below can carry up to three different kinds of evidence, and none of them is the same claim. A register is a head-count — a state counted these people. A record is one document naming the surname on that ground, narrower evidence and often much older. And a volume overlapping these dates is a document from the right place and years — never a document known to name this surname. None of the three ever means the name exists in that country and nowhere else, or that it exists nowhere but here.

United States of America

149 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

152,834 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1870s, 1900s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1970s and 1990s — the decades Attwell is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Attwell. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Attwell in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

South Africa

Found in a record — Booyzen.

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Attwell in South Africa, so it cannot narrow South Africa's 5,287 volumes by date — see South Africa's own page for all of it.

Whose archive held that ground, and when

Every surname site can tell you a name is common somewhere. This one also knows which filing system held that ground in which years — and those are the two halves of one question: my people were called this, they were there, so who has the paper, and for which century. A name in Croatia before 1881 may sit in a military series and not a county one; a name in the Netherlands before 1811 has no civil record at all, only a baptism.

This is about the ground, not about your family. A register counting a name in a country says nothing about which village. And these are the pieces of a country this atlas has drawn, which in a large one may be a corner of it — Acadia reaches into Maine and is not a statement about the United States, and Bohemia's ground crosses into Poland. Each region's own page says which ground it covers. Where a country is missing below, nothing covers it yet.

United States of America
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark
South Africa
  • The eastern Cape 6 eras Dutch East India Company → First British occupation → Batavian Republic → Cape Colony → …

Find Attwell on the map →

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