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Maier

Maier, also written Meyer, Major. Attested in United States of America, France, Spain, Poland, Slovenia, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 16,223 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.

MeyerMajor

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.

MayerMajer

Only sounds alike

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

MaerMairMierMagerMaiorMauer

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 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.

  • occupational surname kind of surname
  • Named after Meier what the name is from
  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q21491456 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.

  • occupations what the German entry says it is from
  • German what the Romanian entry says it is from
  • English · German · Romanian 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.

Maier on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 86981005. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

6 places drawn, the largest being Mayer, Maier, Meyer, Majer, Major, MajorMajor — 1Major — 1Majer — 9Meyer — 31Maier — 304Mayer — 1,903
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.

  • Maier Austria pop. 304
  • Mayer United States of America pop. 1,903 a spelling of the name
  • Meyer United States of America pop. 31 a spelling of the name
  • Majer Croatia pop. 9 a spelling of the name
  • Major Spain a spelling of the name
  • Major Hungary a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 8 countries: United States of America, France, Spain, Poland, Slovenia, Belgium, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 34 peopleBelgium — 40 peopleSlovenia — 41 peoplePoland — 120 peopleSpain — 628 peopleFrance — 1,225 peopleUnited States of America — 14,135 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 8 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. 40 people in 4 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 23. 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 Antwerpen, Ukkel, Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, BrasschaatBrasschaat — 5Sint-Pieters-Woluwe — 6Ukkel — 6Antwerpen — 23

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

14,135 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

504,892 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1730s, 1800s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. 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 →

France

1,225 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

1,293 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1540s, 1680s, 1730s, 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, 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 Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

15,779 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1740s, 1820s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Immigration and emigration, Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

15,650 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1530s, 1580s, 1630s, 1650s, 1700s, 1730s, 1740s, 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 Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. 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 →

Slovenia

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

Whose archive to write to

1,278 of 1,585 volumes held for Slovenia overlap the 1850s, 1860s, 1880s, 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Slovenia →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

22,552 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1490s, 1650s, 1730s, 1740s, 1790s, 1800s, 1820s, 1840s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. 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 →

Italy

34 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

734,563 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1750s, 1760s, 1800s, 1830s, 1850s, 1860s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. 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

3,740 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1750s, 1760s, 1780s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Maier is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maier. 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 89
  • 1901–1910 105
  • 1911–1920 80
  • 1921–1930 101
  • 1931–1940 99
  • 1941–1950 139
  • 1951–1960 162
  • 1961–1970 139
  • 1971–1980 100
  • 1981–1990 110
  • 1991–2000 101

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
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 → …
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 → …
Belgium

Regions are also drawn in 2 other countries 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 Maier on the map →

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