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Petrov

Petrov, also written Petrow, Petroff, Pyatrow, Pietrow. Attested in Spain, United States of America, Belgium, Slovenia, France, Italy, Poland, Denmark, borne by about 5,198 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.

PetrowPetroffPyatrowPietrowPetrovs

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.

Petrów

Only sounds alike

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

PetrivPetroviPetrovyPetrová

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.

  • Bulgarian · Russian · Macedonian · Ukrainian · multiple languages 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 · masculine family name kind of surname
  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q2080805 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.

  • Bulgarian · Russian what the English entry says it is from
  • Bulgarian · Russian what the Portuguese entry says it is from
  • English · Portuguese 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.

Petrov on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 91239399. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being PetrovPetrov — 1,302
Where those places are. A dot is a settlement whose name is this surname, sized by its population — not a claim that anybody of the name lives there. Phonetic neighbours are listed below but not drawn: putting a machine's guess on the ground would dress it up as geography.

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.

  • Petrov Czechia pop. 1,302
  • Petrova Slovakia pop. 925 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 8 countries: Spain, United States of America, Belgium, Slovenia, France, Italy, Poland, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedPoland — 24 peopleItaly — 33 peopleFrance — 62 peopleSlovenia — 208 peopleBelgium — 226 peopleUnited States of America — 2,129 peopleSpain — 2,516 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. 226 people in 23 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Gent with 51. 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.
23 places drawn, the largest being Gent, Antwerpen, Schaarbeek, Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe, Brussel, Anderlecht, Charleroi, Maasmechelen, Oudergem, LuikSint-Niklaas — 5Waterloo — 5Ukkel — 5Sint-Gillis — 5Evere — 5Seraing — 6Tielt — 6Sint-Joost-ten-Node — 6Etterbeek — 6Tervuren — 7Roosdaal — 7Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — 7Mechelen — 7Luik — 8Oudergem — 8Maasmechelen — 9Charleroi — 9Anderlecht — 10Brussel — 11Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe — 12Schaarbeek — 15Antwerpen — 16Gent — 51

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.

Spain

2,516 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 Petrov in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 35,936 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

United States of America

2,129 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

90,943 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1910s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Petrov is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Petrov. 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 →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Petrov in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

Slovenia

208 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

Petrov is attested in Slovenia in the 1970s. 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.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

171 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1880s and 2000s — the decades Petrov is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Petrov. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Italy

33 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

17,033 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1940s — the decades Petrov is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Petrov. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

3,092 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1900s and 1930s — the decades Petrov is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Petrov. 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 →

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 Petrov in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

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. This name's first French births fall in 1941–1950 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 —
  • 1911–1920 —
  • 1921–1930 —
  • 1931–1940 —
  • 1941–1950 1
  • 1951–1960 8
  • 1961–1970 14
  • 1971–1980 7
  • 1981–1990 14
  • 1991–2000 18

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
Belgium
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 → …
France
Italy
  • Carnia, Friuli 6 eras Patriarchate of Aquileia → Republic of Venice → Austria → Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Campania — Caserta and Naples 5 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Eastern Sicily — Catania 4 eras Kingdom of Sicily → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → Italy
  • Calabria 4 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Italy
  • 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 Petrov on the map →

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