Record Atlas
United States of America · Spain

Gerena

Gerena. Attested in United States of America, Spain, borne by about 3,502 people in the registers this map holds.

The spellings of Lerena

Rio de la Plata and Extremadura. A clerk's L, S, G, P or tilde is the commonest reason a search for Lerena finds nothing. This is the one list the atlas keeps of which spellings are the same name, and what each rests on. Case, spacing, hyphens and apostrophes are not counted as separate spellings, so De Franceschi and Defranceschi are one form. An accent is: a priest's Lereña is not a clerk's Lerena.

Searching for this name? Try every one of: Lerena · Llerena · Gerena · Lereña · Leresa · Lerina · Levena · Lorena · Serena · Sereña

The same family

One record, or the family's own tree, writes one person or family both ways.

  • Lerena
    what it rests on
    • The ordinary form in the Rio de la Plata and the spelling the family archive uses as its own (135 rows). Argentina, Uruguay · the Lerena family archive
  • Llerena
    what it rests on
    • An 1889 Buenos Aires probate writes one man both Lerena and Llerena, twice each, in one hand. Also the commoner form in Spain, from the Extremaduran town. Argentina, Spain · 1889 · the Lerena family archive
    • The parish registers of one Uruguayan city spell one man's name both ways across forty years. Uruguay · 1793-1833 · the Lerena family archive

Met on this line's records

Met on a record of this family's line by the archive that read it.

  • Gerena this page
    what it rests on
    • An 1811 baptism names a grandparent Gerena in the same sentence that writes the father Llerena. Uruguay · 1811 · the Lerena family archive
  • Lereña
    what it rests on
    • Written by the priest himself on a marriage act of 1825, and on a Montevideo cathedral act of 1879. Not a transcriber's error. Uruguay · 1825-1879 · the Lerena family archive
  • Leresa
    what it rests on
    • The transcript of the 1858 Trinidad diagram reads Leresa where the plate says Lerena. A transcript's spelling, not the clerk's. Uruguay · 1858 · the Lerena family archive
  • Lerina
    what it rests on
    • An original act of October 1833 names a family Lerina. The archive had excluded the form as Italian and took that back. Uruguay · 1833 · the Lerena family archive
    • A party of four under the name Lerina on a Genoa to Buenos Aires passenger list of March 1889 (CEMLA), recorded as Italian immigrants; the archive holds them as not this family. Lerina is also an Italian surname, so the form is decided record by record. Italy, Argentina · 1889 · the Lerena family archive
  • Levena
    what it rests on
    • A godparent on the same 1879 Montevideo act that writes the father Lereña and the grandfather Serena: four spellings of one family's name on one page. Uruguay · 1879 · the Lerena family archive
  • Lorena
    what it rests on
    • The 1858 Trinidad kinship diagram writes family members Lorena, and the family's central army enrolment record was indexed under it. Uruguay · 1858-1981 · the Lerena family archive
  • Serena
    what it rests on
    • An 1879 Montevideo cathedral act and a Trinidad kinship diagram of 1858 write the family's name Serena. A sweep on it found children for two couples the archive had worked for weeks. Uruguay · 1858-1879 · the Lerena family archive
    • Ten hits in the Uruguay census collection 1726-1858, two of them complete households. Uruguay · 1726-1858 · the Lerena family archive
    • A Serena family of San Jose (Flores) appears in the civil marriage books of 1931-1950; its signatures, set beside two Lerena signatures at one magnification, are of another form. Serena is a name in its own right, so a Serena is a lead until an act ties it to this family. Uruguay · 1931-1950 · the Lerena family archive
    • a 1955 Flores death act writes a Lerena couple's family name Serena in the margin, the name and the father's line; the parents' given names and the spouse settle the family Uruguay · 1955 · the Lerena family archive

By a documented rule

Reached by a documented mechanical substitution. No record needed.

  • Sereña
    what it rests on
    • FamilySearch folds the n-tilde: a search for Sereña returns the identical 290 records as Serena. No separate sweep is needed. Uruguay · the Lerena family archive
1 lead, never yet seen on a record — worth searching, never worth writing down alone

Plausible and never seen on a record. Search it; never write a data row on it alone.

  • Loreña
    what it rests on
    • Listed beside Lereña as the tilde-added form; no record of its own is cited. Uruguay · the Lerena family archive

Decide each record on its own

Sometimes this family, sometimes another. Decide per record.

  • Larena
    what it rests on
    • Fourteen people under this form in Santa Fe and Entre Rios, 1837-1913. At Cayasta it is an Italian colony's name and not this family; in Entre Rios it shadows the Lerena family. Argentina · 1837-1913 · the Lerena family archive
  • Perena
    what it rests on
    • A father's surname on an 1899 marriage, and the same man written Serena in the companion volume. Perena is also a surname in its own right: a lead, not a relative, until an act says otherwise. Uruguay · 1899 · the Lerena family archive
3 look-alikes that are not this name — they turn up in searches; do not count them
  • Corena — A civil death act of Flores, 1930s-1940s, in which a looped capital C reads Lerena in the machine transcript; at the plate the surname is Corena, a different name. Read it at the plate before counting a Lerena.
  • Herencia — The Spanish word for inheritance. In a corpus of probate files it impersonates the surname (la lerena, la lerencia): find out what your surname is a misreading of before trusting a full-text count.
  • Lerrena — One full-text hit in the Colombian Catholic records. Not pursued and not this family.
6 possible variants, unverified — names that only sound alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence. Nobody has checked these against a record. Treat one as a lead to look for, never as a finding.

GerenGerenéGereñuGerinaGeronaYerena

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.

  • No origin given the entry exists and its surname template names nothing the name is from — 52,640 of the 78,628 entries this atlas matched are silent this way, which is the dictionary's gap and not a judgement about the name
  • 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.

Gerena on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87351990. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

On the map

  • A country that counted the name
  • A place of this name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it. 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 2 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.

It is also the name of a place

The places are drawn on the map above. A dot there 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.

  • Gerena Spain pop. 5,803
  • Gerona Philippines pop. 40,914 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Geren Switzerland pop. 23 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Gereñu Spain only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Gerona Uruguay only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Gerona Colombia only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

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.

United States of America

2,871 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

58,882 of 688,143 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Gerena is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Gerena. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

3,451 of 45,312 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1920s — the decades Gerena is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Gerena. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists, Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

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.

United States of America
Spain

Find Gerena on the map →

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