Record Atlas
Belgium · Denmark

Paulussen

Paulussen, also written Paulssen. Attested in Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 566 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.

Paulssen

Only sounds alike

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

PaulissenPoulussenPaulsenPaulisenPaulsson

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.

  • Dutch · 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.

  • patronymic family name · family name based on given name kind of surname

Q83375550 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

Where it came from

No place of this name is in the gazetteer, so this map says nothing about where the name came from. Search a surname anywhere else and you will be told an origin — that it is Latin, or Italian, or means «joyful». That is etymology, it is usually unsourced, and it is a different question from the one answered here.

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 2 countries: Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 566 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 2 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. 566 people in 40 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Oudsbergen with 44. 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.
40 places drawn, the largest being Oudsbergen, Antwerpen, As, Lanaken, Turnhout, Kasterlee, Bilzen-Hoeselt, Lille, Tongeren-Borgloon, GenkSint-Truiden — 5Beringen — 5Seraing — 5Diest — 5Olen — 5Geel — 5Kalmthout — 5Brecht — 5Landen — 6Westerlo — 6Mol — 6Heusden-Zolder — 7Diepenbeek — 7Beerse — 7Oud-Turnhout — 8Hoogstraten — 8Herentals — 9Maasmechelen — 10Houthalen-Helchteren — 10Malle — 10Riemst — 11Dilsen-Stokkem — 11Vosselaar — 11Tienen — 12Schoten — 13Zoersel — 14Hasselt — 15Ravels — 15Maaseik — 16Grobbendonk — 16Genk — 17Tongeren-Borgloon — 20Lille — 20Bilzen-Hoeselt — 26Kasterlee — 26Turnhout — 30Lanaken — 36As — 36Antwerpen — 43Oudsbergen — 44

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

566 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 Paulussen is attested here. None is known to name Paulussen: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

Denmark

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

Whose archive to write to

2,274 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1830s, 1840s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1900s, 1950s, 1960s and 1990s — the decades Paulussen is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Paulussen. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Denmark →

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
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

Find Paulussen on the map →

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