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Molon

Molon. Attested in France, Italy, Spain, United States of America, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 1,118 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.

MollonMoelon

Only sounds alike

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

MołońMalonMałońMilonMiłońMolanMoleńMolin

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being MollönMollön — 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.

  • Mollön Sweden a spelling of the name
  • Malón Spain pop. 422 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Molan Italy pop. 70 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Molin Italy pop. 14 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Malòn Italy only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Malön Sweden only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 6 countries: France, Italy, Spain, United States of America, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 34 peopleUnited States of America — 125 peopleSpain — 155 peopleItaly — 209 peopleFrance — 595 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 6 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. 34 people in 5 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Tienen with 10. 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 Tienen, Fleurus, Anderlecht, Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, CharleroiCharleroi — 5Sint-Pieters-Leeuw — 5Anderlecht — 6Fleurus — 8Tienen — 10

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.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

532 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1760s, 1780s, 1840s, 1860s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Molon is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Molon. 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 →

Italy

209 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

453,296 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1380s, 1500s, 1570s, 1700s, 1750s, 1770s, 1820s, 1840s, 1850s, 1900s, 1930s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Molon is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Molon. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

177 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1530s — the decades Molon is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Molon. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

United States of America

125 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

364,434 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Molon is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Molon. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Belgium

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

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

92 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1940s and 1960s — the decades Molon is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Molon. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records. 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 35
  • 1901–1910 40
  • 1911–1920 35
  • 1921–1930 55
  • 1931–1940 46
  • 1941–1950 71
  • 1951–1960 79
  • 1961–1970 74
  • 1971–1980 57
  • 1981–1990 64
  • 1991–2000 39

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.

France
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 → …
United States of America
Belgium
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

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

Find Molon on the map →

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