Record Atlas
Belgium · France · United States of America

Samyn

Samyn. Attested in Belgium, France, United States of America, borne by about 3,759 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.

Samin

Only sounds alike

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

SamanSamońSameyn

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.

Q37551238 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being SaminSamin — 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.

  • Samin Poland a spelling of the name
  • Sāmān Iran pop. 14,192 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Saman Ghana pop. 9,000 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: Belgium, France, United States of AmericaUnited States of America — 167 peopleFrance — 1,618 peopleBelgium — 1,974 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 3 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. 1,974 people in 102 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Roeselare with 207. 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.
102 places drawn, the largest being Roeselare, Kortrijk, Izegem, Wevelgem, Wervik, Zonnebeke, Menen, Moeskroen, Doornik, MoorsledeLendelede — 13Zedelgem — 13Oostrozebeke — 14Houthulst — 14Leuven — 14Brussel — 14Sint-Niklaas — 15Koekelare — 15Ardooie — 16Ingelmunster — 16Ichtegem — 16Waregem — 16Beersel — 16Schaarbeek — 16Hooglede — 17Knokke-Heist — 17Antwerpen — 17Oudenaarde — 18Diksmuide — 22Staden — 23Wingene — 24Tielt — 25Harelbeke — 27Brugge — 28Ledegem — 32Komen-Waasten — 34Poperinge — 36Oostende — 40Gent — 43Ieper — 47Moorslede — 48Doornik — 54Moeskroen — 58Menen — 63Zonnebeke — 65Wervik — 72Wevelgem — 82Izegem — 86Kortrijk — 100Roeselare — 207

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

1,974 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

12,939 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1840s, 1850s, 1870s, 1900s, 1940s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Samyn is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Samyn. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

France

1,618 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, 1950s, 1970s and 2000s — the decades Samyn is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Samyn. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Samyn in United States of America, so it cannot narrow United States of America's 528,875 volumes by date — see United States of America'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 48
  • 1901–1910 85
  • 1911–1920 98
  • 1921–1930 135
  • 1931–1940 131
  • 1941–1950 166
  • 1951–1960 211
  • 1961–1970 202
  • 1971–1980 187
  • 1981–1990 191
  • 1991–2000 164

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
France
United States of America

Find Samyn on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable