Record Atlas
United States of America · Poland · Spain · Belgium · Slovenia · Italy · Denmark

Leka

Leka. Attested in United States of America, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 609 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, inflected

A rule of the language rather than an opinion. Polish makes Kowalski and Kowalska of one surname.

Leky

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.

LecaLęckaLecha

Only sounds alike

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

LękLakaLekiLekoLikaLokaLuka

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Lecka, LečaLeča — 1Lecka — 1,013
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.

  • Lecka Poland pop. 1,013 a spelling of the name
  • Leča Serbia a spelling of the name
  • Luká Czechia pop. 901 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Luka Croatia pop. 420 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Loka Slovenia pop. 354 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Lóka Hungary 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, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Slovenia, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 11 peopleSlovenia — 13 peopleBelgium — 35 peopleSpain — 39 peoplePoland — 48 peopleUnited States of America — 463 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. 35 people in 5 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Brussel with 11. 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.
5 places drawn, the largest being Brussel, Schaarbeek, Oudenaarde, Oostkamp, Merelbeke-MelleMerelbeke-Melle — 5Oostkamp — 5Oudenaarde — 7Schaarbeek — 7Brussel — 11

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

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

Whose archive to write to

5,640 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1990s — the decades Leka is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Leka. 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 →

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

1,272 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1920s — the decades Leka is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Leka. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Poland →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

1,137 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s — the decades Leka is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Leka. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

35 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 Leka in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

Slovenia

13 Borne — a state counted them — Family names, Slovenia, 2026 (SURS tables 05X1015S–05X1018S).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Leka in Slovenia, so it cannot narrow Slovenia's 1,585 volumes by date — see Slovenia's own page for all of it.

Italy

11 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

64,824 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1910s — the decades Leka is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Leka. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

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 Leka in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

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
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
Slovenia
  • Central Istria 8 eras Aquileia → Habsburg → Napoleonic → Austria–Hungary → …
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …
Italy
  • 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 → …

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 Leka on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable