Record Atlas
United States of America · Denmark

Klehn

Klehn, also written Klein. Attested in United States of America, Denmark, borne by about 113 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.

Klein

Only sounds alike

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

KlahnKlohnKlyhnKlaehnKloehn

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.

  • English · 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.

Q83362561 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Klein, KleinKlein — 1Klein — 168
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.

  • Klein United States of America pop. 168 a spelling of the name
  • Klein 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, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedUnited States of America — 113 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 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.

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

113 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

418,422 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Klehn is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Klehn. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Denmark

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

Whose archive to write to

2,600 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1850s, 1860s, 1880s, 1940s, 1950s and 1970s — the decades Klehn is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Klehn. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Denmark →

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

Find Klehn on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable