Record Atlas
Poland · France · United States of America · Spain

Palus

Palus. Attested in Poland, France, United States of America, Spain, borne by about 1,750 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.

PallusPałusz

Only sounds alike

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

PałusPalsPlusPłusPalesPaliśPalošPalys

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.

  • Czech · Polish · Slovak 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.

Palus on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 82794840. 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.

  • Pals Spain pop. 2,366 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Palos United States of America only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: Poland, France, United States of America, SpainSpain — 48 peopleUnited States of America — 268 peopleFrance — 280 peoplePoland — 1,154 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.

Poland

1,154 Borne — a state counted them — Nazwiska występujące w rejestrze PESEL (z uwzględnieniem osób zmarłych).

Whose archive to write to

1,793 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s — the decades Palus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Palus. 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 →

France

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

Whose archive to write to

178 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1880s, 1900s, 1960s and 1990s — the decades Palus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Palus. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

118,322 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1880s, 1890s and 1930s — the decades Palus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Palus. 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 →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

4,189 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1910s, 1950s and 1960s — the decades Palus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Palus. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

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 8
  • 1901–1910 20
  • 1911–1920 29
  • 1921–1930 35
  • 1931–1940 36
  • 1941–1950 30
  • 1951–1960 31
  • 1961–1970 37
  • 1971–1980 28
  • 1981–1990 13
  • 1991–2000 13

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.

  • 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 → …

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

Find Palus on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable