Record Atlas
France · Belgium · Spain

Bats

Bats. Attested in France, Belgium, Spain, borne by about 1,972 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.

BätzBattsBaets

Only sounds alike

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

BetsBotsButsBaatsBatasBatesBatis

It is also the name of a place

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.

  • Bates United States of America only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: France, Belgium, SpainSpain — 48 peopleBelgium — 150 peopleFrance — 1,774 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.
Belgium, by commune. 150 people in 14 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 29. 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.
14 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Lier, Sint-Niklaas, Gingelom, Berlaar, Nijlen, Seraing, Schoten, Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht, RanstHeist-op-den-Berg — 5Bonheiden — 5Mortsel — 5Boechout — 5Ranst — 6Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 7Schoten — 10Seraing — 12Nijlen — 12Berlaar — 12Gingelom — 13Sint-Niklaas — 13Lier — 16Antwerpen — 29

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.

France

1,774 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

Bats is attested in France in the 1420s, 1940s, 1950s and 1980s. 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.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

4,357 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1860s, 1920s and 1950s — the decades Bats is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Bats. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Bats in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain'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 99
  • 1901–1910 143
  • 1911–1920 134
  • 1921–1930 191
  • 1931–1940 176
  • 1941–1950 161
  • 1951–1960 230
  • 1961–1970 204
  • 1971–1980 142
  • 1981–1990 161
  • 1991–2000 133

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.

France
Belgium

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

Find Bats on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable