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Fois

Fois. Attested in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark, borne by about 916 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.

Fojs

Only sounds alike

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

FiśFosFaisFeisFoosFossFous

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.

  • Sardinian what the Italian entry says it is from
  • Italian 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.

Fois on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87874580. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

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.

  • Foss United States of America pop. 152 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Fos Italy only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Foss United Kingdom only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 7 countries: France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedSlovenia — 5 peoplePoland — 6 peopleBelgium — 24 peopleSpain — 64 peopleItaly — 197 peopleFrance — 620 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 7 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. 24 people in 2 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is La Louvière with 16. 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.
2 places drawn, the largest being La Louvière, ManageManage — 8La Louvière — 16

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

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

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

Fois is attested in France in the 1970s. Not one of the 1,513 volumes this atlas holds for France covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on France's shelf rather than after.

Italy

197 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

353,418 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1780s, 1840s, 1890s, 1910s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Fois is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Fois. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

802 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1600s — the decades Fois is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Fois. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

24 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 Fois in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

4,146 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1870s and 1900s — the decades Fois is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Fois. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Poland →

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 Fois 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

2,713 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1820s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s and 1970s — the decades Fois is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Fois. 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 Denmark →

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 10
  • 1901–1910 11
  • 1911–1920 34
  • 1921–1930 41
  • 1931–1940 27
  • 1941–1950 36
  • 1951–1960 83
  • 1961–1970 103
  • 1971–1980 77
  • 1981–1990 94
  • 1991–2000 104

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
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 → …
Belgium
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 → …
Slovenia
  • Central Istria 8 eras Aquileia → Habsburg → Napoleonic → Austria–Hungary → …
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …

Regions are also drawn in 1 other country 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 Fois on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable