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Primus

Primus. Attested in United States of America, Poland, France, Croatia, Belgium, Italy, borne by about 2,903 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.

PrymusPrimusz

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.

Q16863141 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being PrimusPrimus — 1
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.

  • Primus United States of America

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 6 countries: United States of America, Poland, France, Croatia, Belgium, ItalyItaly — 6 peopleBelgium — 17 peopleCroatia — 23 peopleFrance — 120 peoplePoland — 124 peopleUnited States of America — 2,613 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 6 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. 17 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Ravels with 17. 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.
1 place drawn, the largest being RavelsRavels — 17

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

2,613 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

38,066 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Primus is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Primus. 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 →

Poland

124 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 Primus in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland's own page for all of it.

France

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Primus in France, so it cannot narrow France's 1,513 volumes by date — see France's own page for all of it.

Croatia

23 Borne — a state counted them — Names and surnames in the Republic of Croatia, 2011 Population Census (DZS).

Names and surnames in the Republic of Croatia, 2011 Population Census (DZS) answers questions rather than publishing a list. This name was asked about because the atlas already holds it elsewhere — a name absent here may simply never have been asked about, not absent from Croatia.

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Primus in Croatia, so it cannot narrow Croatia's 5,047 volumes by date — see Croatia's own page for all of it.

Belgium

17 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 Primus in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

Italy

6 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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Primus in Italy, so it cannot narrow Italy's 1,288,913 volumes by date — see Italy'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 1911–1920 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 —
  • 1911–1920 2
  • 1921–1930 7
  • 1931–1940 5
  • 1941–1950 10
  • 1951–1960 22
  • 1961–1970 15
  • 1971–1980 21
  • 1981–1990 22
  • 1991–2000 16

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
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 → …
France
Croatia
  • Central Istria 8 eras Aquileia → Habsburg → Napoleonic → Austria–Hungary → …
  • Southern Istria 9 eras Patriarchate of Aquileia → Republic of Venice → Austria → Napoleonic → …
  • The Kvarner — Senj, Vinodol, Rijeka 8 eras Frankopan counts of Krk and Vinodol → Habsburg → Napoleonic → Austria–Hungary → …
  • Dalmatia 10 eras Hungarian–Croatian crown → Republic of Venice → Austria → French Illyria → …
  • The Imotski frontier 7 eras Ottoman Empire → Republic of Venice → Austria → French Illyria → …
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …
  • The Military Frontier — Vojna krajina 8 eras Habsburg military frontier, under Graz and Vienna → Habsburg → Croatia-Slavonia, within Hungary → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; Yugoslavia → …
Belgium

Regions are also drawn in 1 other country 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.

Find Primus on the map →

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