Record Atlas
France · Spain · United States of America · Belgium

Ferret

Ferret. Attested in France, Spain, United States of America, Belgium, borne by about 6,663 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.

Ferrett

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: France, Spain, United States of America, BelgiumBelgium — 70 peopleUnited States of America — 119 peopleSpain — 913 peopleFrance — 5,561 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. 70 people in 6 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Moeskroen with 24. 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.
6 places drawn, the largest being Moeskroen, Moorslede, Kortrijk, Ledegem, Wevelgem, WervikWervik — 5Wevelgem — 6Ledegem — 9Kortrijk — 12Moorslede — 14Moeskroen — 24

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.

France

5,561 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

373 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1810s, 1840s, 1850s, 1870s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Ferret is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Ferret. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

6,293 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1880s and 1930s — the decades Ferret is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Ferret. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Ferret in United States of America, so it cannot narrow United States of America's 528,875 volumes by date — see United States of America's own page for all of it.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

1,018 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1910s — the decades Ferret is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Ferret. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

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 320
  • 1901–1910 410
  • 1911–1920 390
  • 1921–1930 529
  • 1931–1940 493
  • 1941–1950 576
  • 1951–1960 639
  • 1961–1970 666
  • 1971–1980 496
  • 1981–1990 533
  • 1991–2000 509

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
United States of America
Belgium

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

Find Ferret on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable