Record Atlas
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Samy

Samy. Attested in France, United States of America, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 1,477 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.

Sama

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.

SamîZamy

Only sounds alike

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

SamSameSammSamoSemySimy

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being SamaSama — 39,984
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.

  • Sama Spain pop. 39,984 a spelling of the name
  • Same Tanzania pop. 34,322 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Sam Benin pop. 12,006 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Samo Côte d'Ivoire pop. 8,327 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Same Timor-Leste pop. 7,500 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Samo Italy pop. 869 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 5 countries: France, United States of America, Spain, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 7 peopleSpain — 58 peopleUnited States of America — 354 peopleFrance — 1,058 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.
Belgium, by commune. 7 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Charleroi with 7. 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 CharleroiCharleroi — 7

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.

France

1,058 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

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

Samy is attested in France in the 1950s and 1980s. Not one of the 1,513 volumes this atlas holds for France covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on France's shelf rather than after.

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

104,377 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1910s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Samy is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Samy. 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

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

Whose archive to write to

12,462 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1790s, 1840s, 1860s and 1880s — the decades Samy is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Samy. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Immigration and emigration, Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

7 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 Samy in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium'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

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Samy 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.

  • 1891–1900 28
  • 1901–1910 54
  • 1911–1920 48
  • 1921–1930 77
  • 1931–1940 90
  • 1941–1950 69
  • 1951–1960 148
  • 1961–1970 144
  • 1971–1980 124
  • 1981–1990 128
  • 1991–2000 148

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.

France
United States of America
Belgium
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 Samy on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable