Record Atlas
Spain · United States of America · France · Belgium · Denmark

Badia

Badia. Attested in Spain, United States of America, France, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 14,900 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, spelt two ways

One systematic substitution — s for z, w for v, ch for h — where BOTH spellings are independently attested surnames. Kosina and Kozina are one man in two clerks' handwriting. Stronger than sounding alike, weaker than somebody having checked.

Badja

Only sounds alike

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

BadaBadiBadaaBaddaBadeaBadieBadiiBadio

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.

  • Spanish · Catalan 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

Q117195939 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

What Wiktionary says this name is

Copied from the surname template on Wiktionary, not worked out here, and not from its etymology prose. Anyone may edit it; the page and the revision it was read at are linked below.

  • English recorded as a surname in these languages

    A language here is the language of the NAME, not a country a family came from — the same caveat the Wikidata section carries, and worth repeating rather than assumed read.

Badia on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87363534. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Badia, BadjaBadja — 6Badia — 893
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.

  • Badia Italy pop. 893
  • Badja Australia pop. 6 a spelling of the name
  • Bāda India pop. 20,372 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Badi India pop. 19,603 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Bada Russia pop. 5,149 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Badi Italy pop. 251 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 5 countries: Spain, United States of America, France, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 6 peopleFrance — 751 peopleUnited States of America — 872 peopleSpain — 13,271 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 5 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.
Belgium, by commune. 6 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Libramont-Chevigny with 6. This is the only country here that can be drawn this way — every other register counts a country and stops, so a blank elsewhere is a gap in what states publish, not in the name.
1 place drawn, the largest being Libramont-ChevignyLibramont-Chevigny — 6

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.

Spain

13,271 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

30,332 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1500s, 1760s, 1770s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1830s, 1840s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Badia is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Badia. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Immigration and emigration, Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

87,104 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1920s, 1970s and 2000s — the decades Badia is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Badia. 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 →

France

751 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

5 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1910s, 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Badia is attested here. None is known to name Badia: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Belgium

6 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

69 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1610s — the decades Badia is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Badia. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

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 Badia in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

When it was being born, in France

INSEE counts births by surname and decade from the état civil, 1891 to 2000 — the only dated evidence in this dataset. A name that starts at zero and climbs arrived; a name that falls to nothing left, died out, or emigrated, and the decade it stops is the decade to stop searching. It counts births registered in France, so a family that emigrated in 1900 simply stops appearing, which is information rather than a defect.

  • 1891–1900 21
  • 1901–1910 34
  • 1911–1920 52
  • 1921–1930 65
  • 1931–1940 62
  • 1941–1950 84
  • 1951–1960 90
  • 1961–1970 108
  • 1971–1980 89
  • 1981–1990 75
  • 1991–2000 71

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
France
Belgium
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

No record region is drawn yet for Spain — which is a gap in this atlas and not a statement about that country.

Find Badia on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable