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De Smet

De Smet. Attested in Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark, borne by about 13,940 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.

De Smeth

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

Q16869456 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 what the English entry says it is from
  • English 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 Smet on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87788357. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being De SmetDe Smet — 1,072
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.

  • De Smet United States of America pop. 1,072

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: Belgium, France, Spain, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedSpain — 59 peopleFrance — 1,183 peopleBelgium — 12,698 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 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. 12,774 people in 310 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Gent with 761. Only the 150 commonest are drawn; 160 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, Aalst, Antwerpen, Lokeren, Zottegem, Ninove, Sint-Niklaas, Geraardsbergen, Lede, Merelbeke-Melle, with 160 smaller ones omittedGent — 24Zwalm — 83Laarne — 84Berlare — 90Tielt — 95Sint-Lievens-Houtem — 101Puurs-Sint-Amands — 104Oosterzele — 108Zulte — 111Assenede — 117Gavere — 118Brakel — 120Nazareth-De Pinte — 121Haaltert — 121Waregem — 122Aalter — 123Destelbergen — 131Lievegem — 136Brugge — 138Maldegem — 142Herzele — 143Mechelen — 147Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 149Evergem — 156Erpe-Mere — 156Lochristi — 162Eeklo — 168Deinze — 189Wetteren — 197Dendermonde — 199Oudenaarde — 200Merelbeke-Melle — 208Lede — 210Geraardsbergen — 218Sint-Niklaas — 219Ninove — 222Zottegem — 226Lokeren — 231Antwerpen — 355Aalst — 477Gent — 761

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

12,698 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

21,657 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1740s, 1780s, 1800s, 1810s, 1840s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades De Smet is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names De Smet. 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

1,183 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

5 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1910s, 1930s and 1960s — the decades De Smet is attested here. None is known to name De Smet: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Spain

59 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 Smet in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain'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 Smet in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark'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 40
  • 1901–1910 50
  • 1911–1920 84
  • 1921–1930 136
  • 1931–1940 91
  • 1941–1950 119
  • 1951–1960 121
  • 1961–1970 132
  • 1971–1980 132
  • 1981–1990 153
  • 1991–2000 125

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
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

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

Find De Smet on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable