Record Atlas
United States of America · Belgium

Jacobus

Jacobus, also written Jacob, Jakob, Jacobsen, Jacobs. Attested in United States of America, Belgium, borne by about 2,432 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.

JacobJakobJacobsenJacobs

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.

Jakobus

Only sounds alike

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

JacobisJacobeus

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 · Dutch 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

Q25937594 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

4 places drawn, the largest being Jacobus, Jacobs, Jacob, JacobsJacobs — 1Jacob — 1Jacobs — 239Jacobus — 1,848
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.

  • Jacobus United States of America pop. 1,848
  • Jacobs United States of America pop. 239 a spelling of the name
  • Jacob United States of America a spelling of the name
  • Jacobs South Africa a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 2 countries: United States of America, BelgiumBelgium — 49 peopleUnited States of America — 2,383 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. 49 people in 4 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Brugge with 28. 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.
4 places drawn, the largest being Brugge, Oostende, Zedelgem, DammeDamme — 5Zedelgem — 6Oostende — 10Brugge — 28

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

2,383 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

485,695 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1720s, 1780s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Jacobus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jacobus. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

24,405 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1570s, 1710s, 1730s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s — the decades Jacobus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jacobus. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

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
Belgium

Find Jacobus on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable