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Metaj

Metaj. Attested in Belgium, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, borne by about 154 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.

MethajMetai

Only sounds alike

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

MętaMatajMetayMotaj

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.

  • Albanian 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.

Metaj on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 83901961. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

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.

  • Meta Italy pop. 7,598 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Meta United States of America pop. 227 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: Belgium, Slovenia, Spain, ItalyItaly — 16 peopleSpain — 20 peopleSlovenia — 43 peopleBelgium — 75 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.
Belgium, by commune. 75 people in 10 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Hoei with 15. 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.
10 places drawn, the largest being Hoei, Blankenberge, Drogenbos, Ans, Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Schaarbeek, Engis, Brugge, Luik, Saint-NicolasSaint-Nicolas — 5Luik — 5Brugge — 5Engis — 6Schaarbeek — 6Sint-Agatha-Berchem — 6Ans — 7Drogenbos — 8Blankenberge — 12Hoei — 15

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.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

12 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1970s — the decades Metaj is attested here. None is known to name Metaj: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Slovenia

43 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 Metaj in Slovenia, so it cannot narrow Slovenia's 1,585 volumes by date — see Slovenia's own page for all of it.

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Metaj in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

Italy

16 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

194 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1950s — the decades Metaj is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Metaj. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

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.

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 → …

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

Find Metaj on the map →

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