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Mulder

Mulder. Attested in United States of America, France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark, South Africa, borne by about 7,846 people in the registers this map holds.

Only sounds alike

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

MelderMilderMölderMüldürMoulder

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.

  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q23301352 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.

  • Dutch what the English entry says it is from
  • Dutch what the Afrikaans entry says it is from
  • occupations what the Dutch entry says it is from
  • English · Afrikaans · Dutch 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.

Mulder on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 92417042. 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.

  • Melder United States of America only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 8 countries: United States of America, France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Denmark, South AfricaDenmark — attested, not countedSouth Africa — attested, not countedSlovenia — 5 peoplePoland — 10 peopleBelgium — 148 peopleSpain — 179 peopleFrance — 187 peopleUnited States of America — 7,317 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. 148 people in 17 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 33. 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.
17 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Schoten, Luik, Aubange, Kortrijk, Ravels, Haaltert, Essen, Kapellen, LierBilzen-Hoeselt — 5Lommel — 5Flémalle — 5Waasmunster — 5Aalst — 5Halle — 5Rijkevorsel — 5Lier — 5Kapellen — 6Essen — 6Haaltert — 7Ravels — 7Kortrijk — 9Aubange — 11Luik — 11Schoten — 18Antwerpen — 33

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

7,317 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

224,443 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1850s, 1880s, 1900s, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Mulder is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mulder. 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

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Mulder in France, so it cannot narrow France's 1,513 volumes by date — see France's own page for all of it.

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

7,300 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1870s and 1900s — the decades Mulder is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mulder. 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 →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

11,604 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1820s, 1850s, 1890s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s — the decades Mulder is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mulder. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Mulder in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland's own page for all of it.

Slovenia

5 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 Mulder in Slovenia, so it cannot narrow Slovenia's 1,585 volumes by date — see Slovenia'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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Mulder in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

South Africa

Found in a record — Booyzen.

Whose archive to write to

2,864 of 5,287 volumes held for South Africa overlap the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s and 1990s — the decades Mulder is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Mulder. 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 South Africa →

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 4
  • 1901–1910 8
  • 1911–1920 9
  • 1921–1930 13
  • 1931–1940 13
  • 1941–1950 20
  • 1951–1960 26
  • 1961–1970 15
  • 1971–1980 28
  • 1981–1990 27
  • 1991–2000 24

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
Belgium
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 → …

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 Mulder on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable