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Claeys

Claeys. Attested in Belgium, France, United States of America, Spain, borne by about 12,889 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.

ClaeisClays

Only sounds alike

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

ClaèsCleys

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.

  • Dutch 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

Q23777456 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.

  • Dutch 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.

Claeys on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 68742681. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Where it came from

No place of this name is in the gazetteer, so this map says nothing about where the name came from. Search a surname anywhere else and you will be told an origin — that it is Latin, or Italian, or means «joyful». That is etymology, it is usually unsourced, and it is a different question from the one answered here.

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: Belgium, France, United States of America, SpainSpain — 75 peopleUnited States of America — 1,398 peopleFrance — 2,132 peopleBelgium — 9,284 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 4 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. 9,284 people in 257 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Gent with 641. Only the 150 commonest are drawn; 107 more communes hold a few each. 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.
150 places drawn, the largest being Gent, Brugge, Maldegem, Aalter, Deinze, Lievegem, Beernem, Evergem, Kortrijk, Roeselare, with 107 smaller ones omittedLichtervelde — 57Ichtegem — 57Ledegem — 63Jabbeke — 63Izegem — 66Wingene — 68Kortemark — 69Sint-Laureins — 73Moeskroen — 74Kaprijke — 75Zonnebeke — 76Torhout — 76Zulte — 78Menen — 86Wevelgem — 88Ieper — 88Nazareth-De Pinte — 89Waregem — 93Zedelgem — 97Lochristi — 100Merelbeke-Melle — 104Knokke-Heist — 106Tielt — 116Damme — 125Eeklo — 127Oostkamp — 132Assenede — 134Wervik — 134Oostende — 140Antwerpen — 149Roeselare — 157Kortrijk — 162Evergem — 176Beernem — 184Lievegem — 265Deinze — 282Aalter — 312Maldegem — 327Brugge — 520Gent — 641

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.

Belgium

9,284 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

21,996 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1790s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Claeys is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Claeys. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

France

2,132 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

74 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1820s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s — the decades Claeys is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Claeys. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

United States of America

1,398 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

12,124 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1960s — the decades Claeys is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Claeys. 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 →

Spain

75 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 Claeys 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 110
  • 1901–1910 120
  • 1911–1920 135
  • 1921–1930 198
  • 1931–1940 170
  • 1941–1950 223
  • 1951–1960 285
  • 1961–1970 208
  • 1971–1980 246
  • 1981–1990 247
  • 1991–2000 190

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.

Belgium
France
United States of America

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

Find Claeys on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable