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Maleš

Maleš. Attested in United States of America, Spain, France, Slovenia, borne by about 1,722 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.

MależMallesMalesz

Only sounds alike

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

MalsMałsMalaśMališMalosMalusMałasMałus

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.

Q132132602 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.

  • English 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.

Maleš on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 86887700. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being MalešMaleš — 1
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.

  • Maleš Czechia
  • Mals Italy only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Malas Germany only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Málaš Slovakia only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: United States of America, Spain, France, SloveniaSlovenia — 107 peopleFrance — 173 peopleSpain — 681 peopleUnited States of America — 761 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 4 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

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

Whose archive to write to

291,429 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Maleš is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maleš. 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 →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

30,360 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1550s, 1560s, 1640s, 1730s, 1770s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Maleš is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maleš. 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 →

France

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

Whose archive to write to

1,123 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1560s, 1730s, 1760s, 1770s, 1790s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1980s — the decades Maleš is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Maleš. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Slovenia

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

Whose archive to write to
Attested here, and nothing that survives covers those years

Maleš is attested in Slovenia in the 1690s, 1960s and 1990s. Not one of the 1,585 volumes this atlas holds for Slovenia covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Slovenia's shelf rather than after.

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 9
  • 1901–1910 9
  • 1911–1920 19
  • 1921–1930 10
  • 1931–1940 15
  • 1941–1950 20
  • 1951–1960 19
  • 1961–1970 23
  • 1971–1980 30
  • 1981–1990 9
  • 1991–2000 10

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
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 → …

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

Find Maleš on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable