Record Atlas
Spain · United States of America · France

Barcelona

Barcelona. Attested in Spain, United States of America, France, borne by about 3,547 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.

Barcellona

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.

  • Spanish what the Tagalog entry says it is from
  • Tagalog 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.

Barcelona on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 91246890. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

3 places drawn, the largest being Barcelona, Barcelona, BarcelonaBarcelona — 1Barcelona — 815,141Barcelona — 1,686,208
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.

  • Barcelona Spain pop. 1,686,208
  • Barcelona Venezuela pop. 815,141
  • Barcelona United States of America

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: Spain, United States of America, FranceFrance — 86 peopleUnited States of America — 1,144 peopleSpain — 2,317 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. 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.

Spain

2,317 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

1,890 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1640s and 1930s — the decades Barcelona is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Barcelona. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

United States of America

1,144 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

64,090 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1920s — the decades Barcelona is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Barcelona. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

France

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

Whose archive to write to
Attested here, and nothing that survives covers those years

Barcelona is attested in France in the 1970s. Not one of the 1,513 volumes this atlas holds for France covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on France's shelf rather than after.

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 1
  • 1901–1910 —
  • 1911–1920 6
  • 1921–1930 6
  • 1931–1940 7
  • 1941–1950 6
  • 1951–1960 6
  • 1961–1970 16
  • 1971–1980 13
  • 1981–1990 11
  • 1991–2000 14

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.

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

Find Barcelona on the map →

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