Record Atlas
Spain

Maior

Maior, also written Meyer, Major. Attested in Spain, borne by about 68 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.

Mayor

Only sounds alike

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

MairMaorMiorMaierMaioraMaiore

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.

  • Portuguese · 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.

Q355056 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

5 places drawn, the largest being Meyer, Major, Major, Major, MayorMayor — 1Major — 1Major — 1Major — 1Meyer — 31
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.

  • Meyer United States of America pop. 31 a spelling of the name
  • Major Spain a spelling of the name
  • Major Hungary a spelling of the name
  • Major United States of America a spelling of the name
  • Mayor Spain a spelling of the name
  • Maier Austria pop. 304 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 1 country: SpainSpain — 68 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 one country 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.

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

9,172 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1740s, 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Maior is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maior. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Find Maior on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable