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Jensen

Jensen. Attested in United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 138,388 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.

JenzenJenssenJennsen

Only sounds alike

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

GensenJansenJensinJensonJonsénJønsenYensenJeansen

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.

  • Danish · 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.

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

Q12657428 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.

  • Danish · patronymics what the English entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Danish entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Norwegian Bokmål entry says it is from
  • English · Danish · Faroese · Icelandic · Norwegian Bokmål 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.

Jensen on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 92415912. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Jensen, JensenJensen — 412Jensen — 1,445
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.

  • Jensen Australia pop. 1,445
  • Jensen United States of America pop. 412
  • Jansen United States of America pop. 114 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Gensen Germany only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Jenson United States of America only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Jönsen Sweden only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 7 countries: United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Poland, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 77 peoplePoland — 98 peopleFrance — 299 peopleSpain — 982 peopleNorway — 21,253 peopleUnited States of America — 115,679 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 7 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. 77 people in 9 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 18. 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.
9 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Elsene, Brussel, Oudergem, Lier, Gent, Sint-Gillis, Ukkel, Beveren-Kruibeke-ZwijndrechtBeveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 5Ukkel — 5Sint-Gillis — 5Gent — 6Lier — 6Oudergem — 7Brussel — 12Elsene — 13Antwerpen — 18

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

115,679 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

401,990 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Jensen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jensen. 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 →

Norway

21,253 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Spain

982 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 Jensen in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

308 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1420s, 1860s, 1880s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s and 1960s — the decades Jensen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jensen. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Poland

98 Borne — a state counted them — Nazwiska występujące w rejestrze PESEL (z uwzględnieniem osób zmarłych).

Whose archive to write to

9,138 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1820s, 1860s, 1890s, 1900s, 1930s, 1940s and 1970s — the decades Jensen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jensen. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Poland →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

11,921 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1810s, 1850s, 1880s, 1910s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s and 2000s — the decades Jensen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jensen. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers, Military and wartime. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

3,957 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1540s, 1600s, 1670s, 1720s, 1760s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Jensen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Jensen. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Denmark →

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 4
  • 1901–1910 14
  • 1911–1920 16
  • 1921–1930 16
  • 1931–1940 11
  • 1941–1950 23
  • 1951–1960 55
  • 1961–1970 45
  • 1971–1980 36
  • 1981–1990 33
  • 1991–2000 46

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
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway
France
Poland
  • Pomerania and Danzig 7 eras Duchy of Pomerania → Swedish Pomerania in the west; Brandenburg-Prussia in the east → Prussia → German Empire → …
  • Bohemia 6 eras Kingdom of Bohemia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Sudetenland and the Reichsprotektorat → …
  • Posen — Prussian Poland 8 eras Poland → Prussia → Duchy of Warsaw → German Empire → …
  • Galicia 6 eras Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia → Poland → Austria → German and Soviet occupation → …
  • Moravia and Silesia 6 eras Margraviate of Moravia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren → …
  • East Prussia 4 eras State of the Teutonic Order → Duchy, then Kingdom, of Prussia → German Empire → Russia in the north; Poland in the south; Lithuania at Memel
  • Silesia 6 eras Habsburg Bohemian crown lands → Prussia → German Empire → Divided → …
  • Congress Poland — the Russian partition 7 eras Russian Empire → Duchy of Warsaw → Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with Russia → Poland, restored → …
Belgium

Regions are also drawn in 1 other country where this name is attested, further down the register's own list. The order here is how many people a register counted, so the countries above are the ones the name most belongs to.

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

Find Jensen on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable