Record Atlas
France

Gourcuff

Gourcuff, also written Corcuff. Attested in France, borne by about 102 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.

Corcuff

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.

  • French 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.

  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q548106 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

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 1 country: FranceFrance — 102 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 one country 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.

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

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

Whose archive to write to

253 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1850s, 1870s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Gourcuff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Gourcuff. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

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 6
  • 1901–1910 7
  • 1911–1920 9
  • 1921–1930 13
  • 1931–1940 6
  • 1941–1950 11
  • 1951–1960 12
  • 1961–1970 7
  • 1971–1980 5
  • 1981–1990 20
  • 1991–2000 6

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.

Find Gourcuff on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable