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El Moussaoui

El Moussaoui. Attested in Spain, Belgium, France, Denmark, borne by about 5,294 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.

El MoussaouyEl Mousaoui

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: Spain, Belgium, France, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedFrance — 359 peopleBelgium — 976 peopleSpain — 3,959 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. 976 people in 38 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 333. 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.
38 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Sint-Niklaas, Brussel, Anderlecht, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Schaarbeek, Jette, Evere, Dilbeek, LuikDison — 5Tienen — 5Wemmel — 5Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe — 5Mortsel — 5Brecht — 5Aalst — 6Tubeke — 6Temse — 7Halle — 7Sint-Agatha-Berchem — 7Manage — 8Bergen — 8Gent — 8Asse — 8Sint-Joost-ten-Node — 8La Louvière — 9Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 9Sint-Gillis — 9Vorst — 9Ans — 10Mechelen — 10Boom — 10Verviers — 11Sint-Pieters-Leeuw — 11Grimbergen — 11Charleroi — 13Vilvoorde — 13Luik — 14Dilbeek — 14Evere — 19Jette — 22Schaarbeek — 41Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — 54Anderlecht — 73Brussel — 86Sint-Niklaas — 92Antwerpen — 333

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

3,959 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 El Moussaoui in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for El Moussaoui in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for El Moussaoui in France, so it cannot narrow France's 1,513 volumes by date — see France'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 El Moussaoui 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. This name's first French births fall in 1971–1980 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 —
  • 1911–1920 —
  • 1921–1930 —
  • 1931–1940 —
  • 1941–1950 —
  • 1951–1960 —
  • 1961–1970 —
  • 1971–1980 32
  • 1981–1990 142
  • 1991–2000 185

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 El Moussaoui on the map →

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