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

Guèye

Guèye. Attested in Spain, United States of America, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 8,755 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.

Guye

Only sounds alike

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

GueeGuey

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.

Q28222379 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

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.

  • 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.

Guèye on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87358417. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being GuyeGuye — 41,484
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.

  • Guye China pop. 41,484 a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 6 countries: Spain, United States of America, France, Italy, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 247 peopleItaly — 554 peopleFrance — 1,230 peopleUnited States of America — 1,274 peopleSpain — 5,450 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 6 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. 252 people in 18 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 52. 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.
18 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Luik, Charleroi, Brussel, Anderlecht, Namen, Elsene, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Seraing, SchaarbeekCharleroi — 5Gent — 5Maldegem — 5Zaventem — 5Vorst — 5Herstal — 6Moeskroen — 7Ukkel — 10Schaarbeek — 10Seraing — 11Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — 11Elsene — 14Namen — 16Anderlecht — 16Brussel — 21Charleroi — 26Luik — 27Antwerpen — 52

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.

Spain

5,450 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Guèye in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

United States of America

1,274 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

26,645 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1990s and 2000s — the decades Guèye is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Guèye. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Cemeteries and burials, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

France

1,230 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

217 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1770s, 1870s, 1910s, 1950s and 1990s — the decades Guèye is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Guèye. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Italy

554 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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Guèye in Italy, so it cannot narrow Italy's 1,288,913 volumes by date — see Italy's own page for all of it.

Belgium

247 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 Guèye in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium'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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Guèye in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

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 3
  • 1911–1920 1
  • 1921–1930 6
  • 1931–1940 6
  • 1941–1950 17
  • 1951–1960 57
  • 1961–1970 64
  • 1971–1980 153
  • 1981–1990 420
  • 1991–2000 503

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.

  • 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 → …
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

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

Find Guèye on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable