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De Lange

De Lange, also written Delange. Attested in Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, Denmark, South Africa, borne by about 830 people in the registers this map holds.

Also written

A person linked these — Wikidata's «said to be the same as», or a family archive that worked it out from documents.

Delange

Only sounds alike

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

DelaneDelanneDelanoeDelongeDilangeDelangheDe Langhe

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.

Q68016939 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.

De Lange on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 81679571. 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 6 countries: Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, Denmark, South AfricaDenmark — attested, not countedSouth Africa — attested, not countedPoland — 11 peopleSpain — 92 peopleFrance — 98 peopleBelgium — 629 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 6 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. 651 people in 46 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Gent with 54. 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.
46 places drawn, the largest being Gent, Geraardsbergen, Herzele, Deinze, Zottegem, Oudenaarde, Eeklo, Brakel, Destelbergen, ZwalmPajottegem — 6Kampenhout — 6Kapellen — 6Zinnik — 7Lochristi — 7Lievegem — 7Evergem — 7De Haan — 7Kortrijk — 7Anzegem — 7Brussel — 7Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 8Nazareth-De Pinte — 8Essen — 8Zulte — 9Maldegem — 9Sint-Lievens-Houtem — 9Vilvoorde — 9Ninove — 10Affligem — 10Charleroi — 11Oosterzele — 12Lokeren — 13Waregem — 13Lierde — 14Antwerpen — 14Sint-Niklaas — 15Erpe-Mere — 15Antwerpen — 15Aalst — 18Zwalm — 19Destelbergen — 19Brakel — 20Eeklo — 25Oudenaarde — 27Zottegem — 33Deinze — 34Herzele — 45Geraardsbergen — 49Gent — 54

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

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

Whose archive to write to

4,043 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1710s, 1900s, 1930s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades De Lange is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names De Lange. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

France

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

Whose archive to write to

237 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1520s, 1840s, 1850s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1950s and 1970s — the decades De Lange is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names De Lange. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

92 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 De Lange in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

Poland

11 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 De Lange in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland'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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for De Lange in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

South Africa

Found in a record — Booyzen.

Whose archive to write to

2,860 of 5,287 volumes held for South Africa overlap the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades De Lange is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names De Lange. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for South Africa →

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 6
  • 1901–1910 3
  • 1911–1920 7
  • 1921–1930 13
  • 1931–1940 12
  • 1941–1950 6
  • 1951–1960 9
  • 1961–1970 12
  • 1971–1980 15
  • 1981–1990 9
  • 1991–2000 6

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
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 → …
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark
South Africa
  • The eastern Cape 6 eras Dutch East India Company → First British occupation → Batavian Republic → Cape Colony → …

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

Find De Lange on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable