Record Atlas
France · Belgium

Gob

Gob, also written Göbel. Attested in France, Belgium, borne by about 306 people in the registers this map holds.

Also written

A person linked these — Wikidata's «said to be the same as», or a family archive that worked it out from documents.

Göbel

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.

Goeb

Only sounds alike

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

GäbGobaGobeGobiGoboGoby

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.

  • German 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.

  • family name based on given name kind of surname

Q61314551 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being GöbelGöbel — 1
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.

  • Göbel Germany a spelling of the name
  • Goba Ethiopia pop. 66,500 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Gobō Japan pop. 23,481 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Goby United States of America only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 2 countries: France, BelgiumBelgium — 44 peopleFrance — 262 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 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.
Belgium, by commune. 44 people in 6 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Luik with 13. 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 Luik, Aarlen, Sprimont, Momignies, Chaudfontaine, Marche-en-FamenneMarche-en-Famenne — 5Chaudfontaine — 5Momignies — 6Sprimont — 7Aarlen — 8Luik — 13

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

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

Whose archive to write to

39 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1720s and 1940s — the decades Gob is attested here. None is known to name Gob: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

14 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1950s and 1980s — the decades Gob is attested here. None is known to name Gob: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

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 1901–1910 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 9
  • 1911–1920 9
  • 1921–1930 10
  • 1931–1940 14
  • 1941–1950 19
  • 1951–1960 34
  • 1961–1970 43
  • 1971–1980 34
  • 1981–1990 45
  • 1991–2000 45

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
Belgium

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