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Da Silva

Da Silva. Attested in Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark, Ireland, borne by about 66,987 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, inflected

A rule of the language rather than an opinion. Polish makes Kowalski and Kowalska of one surname.

Da Silvy

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.

Da Sylva

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.

  • Portuguese what the French entry says it is from
  • Portuguese what the Occitan entry says it is from
  • Portuguese · French · Occitan 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.

Da Silva on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 90726640. 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 9 countries: Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark, IrelandDenmark — attested, not countedIreland — attested, not countedSlovenia — 5 peoplePoland — 37 peopleItaly — 40 peopleNorway — 219 peopleBelgium — 449 peopleFrance — 28,730 peopleSpain — 37,507 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 9 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. 505 people in 52 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Moeskroen with 37. 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.
52 places drawn, the largest being Moeskroen, Antwerpen, Brussel, Sint-Gillis, Luik, Ukkel, Anderlecht, Aarlen, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, CharleroiLanaken — 6Luik — 6Aywaille — 6Sint-Niklaas — 6Rixensart — 6Vilvoorde — 6Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe — 6Ukkel — 6Evere — 6Grâce-Hollogne — 7Estaimpuis — 7Menen — 7Kortrijk — 7Tienen — 7Schaarbeek — 7Geel — 7Aubange — 8Dendermonde — 8Wervik — 8Anderlecht — 8Attert — 9Doornik — 9Aalst — 9Vorst — 9Brussel — 9Etterbeek — 10Sprimont — 11Komen-Waasten — 11Elsene — 11Antwerpen — 13Charleroi — 14Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — 14Aarlen — 15Anderlecht — 16Ukkel — 17Luik — 19Sint-Gillis — 22Brussel — 22Antwerpen — 32Moeskroen — 37

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

37,507 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

1,986 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1730s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Da Silva is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Da Silva. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

France

28,730 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

165 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1870s, 1910s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Da Silva is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Da Silva. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

11 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1980s and 1990s — the decades Da Silva is attested here. None is known to name Da Silva: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Norway

219 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Italy

40 Borne — a state counted them — Italian comuni publishing their residents' surnames as open data, indexed by the national catalogue dati.gov.it..

Whose archive to write to

66 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1980s — the decades Da Silva is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Da Silva. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Poland

37 Borne — a state counted them — Nazwiska występujące w rejestrze PESEL (z uwzględnieniem osób zmarłych).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Da Silva in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland's own page for all of it.

Slovenia

5 Borne — a state counted them — Family names, Slovenia, 2026 (SURS tables 05X1015S–05X1018S).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Da Silva in Slovenia, so it cannot narrow Slovenia's 1,585 volumes by date — see Slovenia's own page for all of it.

Denmark

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

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

Da Silva is attested in Denmark in the 1990s. Not one of the 4,099 volumes this atlas holds for Denmark covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Denmark's shelf rather than after.

Ireland

Borne — a state counted them — Surnames of babies with ten or more occurrences, 2023–2025 (CSO, VSA110).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Da Silva in Ireland, so it cannot narrow Ireland's 1,568 volumes by date — see Ireland'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 5
  • 1901–1910 8
  • 1911–1920 12
  • 1921–1930 295
  • 1931–1940 499
  • 1941–1950 354
  • 1951–1960 502
  • 1961–1970 3,139
  • 1971–1980 9,833
  • 1981–1990 6,956
  • 1991–2000 7,127

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
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway
Italy
  • Carnia, Friuli 6 eras Patriarchate of Aquileia → Republic of Venice → Austria → Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Campania — Caserta and Naples 5 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Eastern Sicily — Catania 4 eras Kingdom of Sicily → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → Italy
  • Calabria 4 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Italy
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …
Poland
  • Pomerania and Danzig 7 eras Duchy of Pomerania → Swedish Pomerania in the west; Brandenburg-Prussia in the east → Prussia → German Empire → …
  • Bohemia 6 eras Kingdom of Bohemia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Sudetenland and the Reichsprotektorat → …
  • Posen — Prussian Poland 8 eras Poland → Prussia → Duchy of Warsaw → German Empire → …
  • Galicia 6 eras Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia → Poland → Austria → German and Soviet occupation → …
  • Moravia and Silesia 6 eras Margraviate of Moravia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren → …
  • East Prussia 4 eras State of the Teutonic Order → Duchy, then Kingdom, of Prussia → German Empire → Russia in the north; Poland in the south; Lithuania at Memel
  • Silesia 6 eras Habsburg Bohemian crown lands → Prussia → German Empire → Divided → …
  • Congress Poland — the Russian partition 7 eras Russian Empire → Duchy of Warsaw → Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with Russia → Poland, restored → …

Regions are also drawn in 3 other countries where this name is attested, further down the register's own list. The order here is how many people a register counted, so the countries above are the ones the name most belongs to.

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

Find Da Silva on the map →

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