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Nielsen

Nielsen, also written Nilssen. Attested in United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Poland, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Denmark, borne by about 49,884 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.

Nilssen

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.

Nielssen

Only sounds alike

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

NelsenNilsénNielson

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.

  • Norwegian · Danish 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.

  • family name based on given name · patronymic family name kind of surname
  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q16511256 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.

  • Danish · Norwegian · patronymics what the English entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Danish entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Norwegian entry says it is from
  • English · Danish · Icelandic · Norwegian 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.

Nielsen on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 91437191. 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.

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

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 9 countries: United States of America, Norway, Spain, France, Poland, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedSlovenia — 7 peopleItaly — 12 peopleBelgium — 79 peoplePoland — 99 peopleFrance — 272 peopleSpain — 743 peopleNorway — 5,899 peopleUnited States of America — 42,773 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 9 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. 79 people in 8 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Sint-Pieters-Woluwe with 14. 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.
8 places drawn, the largest being Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, Elsene, Antwerpen, Ukkel, Oudergem, Brussel, Kortenberg, SchaarbeekSchaarbeek — 5Kortenberg — 6Brussel — 9Oudergem — 10Ukkel — 11Antwerpen — 11Elsene — 13Sint-Pieters-Woluwe — 14

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

42,773 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

381,921 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Nielsen. 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 →

Norway

5,899 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Spain

743 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 Nielsen in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

4 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1920s and 1940s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. None is known to name Nielsen: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

687 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1940s and 1960s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Nielsen. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Poland →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

18 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1930s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. None is known to name Nielsen: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Italy

12 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

204,943 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1890s and 1900s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Nielsen. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Slovenia

7 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 Nielsen 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

3,951 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1500s, 1580s, 1620s, 1630s, 1710s, 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Nielsen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Nielsen. 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 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 7
  • 1901–1910 4
  • 1911–1920 11
  • 1921–1930 16
  • 1931–1940 15
  • 1941–1950 21
  • 1951–1960 38
  • 1961–1970 33
  • 1971–1980 31
  • 1981–1990 52
  • 1991–2000 44

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
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway
France
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 → …
Belgium

Regions are also drawn in 3 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 Nielsen on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable