Record Atlas
Slovenia · United States of America · Spain · Poland · Denmark

Perša

Perša. Attested in Slovenia, United States of America, Spain, Poland, Denmark, borne by about 379 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, inflected

A rule of the language rather than an opinion. Polish makes Kowalski and Kowalska of one surname.

Persy

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.

Perza

Only sounds alike

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

PeršPršaParsaPersiPerszPeršePursa

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.

  • Pers Italy only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Prša Slovakia only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 5 countries: Slovenia, United States of America, Spain, Poland, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedPoland — 34 peopleSpain — 71 peopleUnited States of America — 100 peopleSlovenia — 174 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 5 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.

Slovenia

174 Borne — a state counted them — Family names, Slovenia, 2026 (SURS tables 05X1015S–05X1018S).

Whose archive to write to
Attested here, and nothing that survives covers those years

Perša is attested in Slovenia in the 1990s. Not one of the 1,585 volumes this atlas holds for Slovenia covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Slovenia's shelf rather than after.

United States of America

100 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census.

Whose archive to write to

5,843 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1970s and 1980s — the decades Perša is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Perša. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial, Church and parish registers, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

2,449 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1800s — the decades Perša is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Perša. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Poland

34 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 Perša in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland'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

1,280 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1860s, 1870s and 1920s — the decades Perša is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Perša. 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 →

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.

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 → …
United States of America
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 → …
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 Perša on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable