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Sánchez

Sánchez, also written Sanchís, Sančess, Sanches, Sanchis. Attested in Spain, United States of America, France, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 2,262,473 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.

SanchísSančessSanchesSanchisSanxis

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.

Sanchec

Only sounds alike

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

SancezSanchiz

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.

  • Spanish · Catalan 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.

  • patronymic family name kind of surname
  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q1158617 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.

  • Spanish · patronymics what the English entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Spanish entry says it is from
  • Spanish · patronymics what the Cebuano entry says it is from
  • Spanish · patronymics what the Ilocano entry says it is from
  • Spanish · patronymics what the Kapampangan entry says it is from
  • patronymics what the Old Galician-Portuguese entry says it is from
  • Spanish · patronymics what the Pangasinan entry says it is from
  • Spanish · patronymics what the Tagalog entry says it is from
  • English · Spanish · Cebuano · Ilocano · Kapampangan · Old Galician-Portuguese · Pangasinan · Tagalog 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.

Sánchez on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 89950801. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

4 places drawn, the largest being Sánchez, Sánchez, Sanchez, SánchezSánchez — 1Sanchez — 1Sánchez — 1Sánchez — 11,365
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.

  • Sánchez Dominican Rep. pop. 11,365
  • Sánchez Argentina
  • Sanchez United States of America
  • Sánchez Uruguay

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 8 countries: Spain, United States of America, France, Belgium, Poland, Slovenia, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 14 peopleSlovenia — 15 peoplePoland — 27 peopleBelgium — 114 peopleFrance — 35,260 peopleUnited States of America — 612,752 peopleSpain — 1,614,291 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. 114 people in 14 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 18. 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.
14 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Vilvoorde, Elsene, Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, Brussel, Ukkel, Dilbeek, Bergen, Schaarbeek, LuikPelt — 5Beringen — 5Koksijde — 5Etterbeek — 5Luik — 6Schaarbeek — 6Bergen — 7Dilbeek — 7Ukkel — 8Brussel — 9Sint-Pieters-Woluwe — 10Elsene — 11Vilvoorde — 12Antwerpen — 18

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

1,614,291 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

35,432 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1400s, 1460s, 1500s, 1530s, 1550s, 1560s, 1580s, 1590s, 1600s, 1610s, 1670s, 1700s, 1720s, 1740s, 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s — the decades Sánchez is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Sánchez. 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 →

United States of America

612,752 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

335,116 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1840s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Sánchez is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Sánchez. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

France

35,260 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

Sánchez is attested in France in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. 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.

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

124 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1730s and 1930s — the decades Sánchez is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Sánchez. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Poland

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

Slovenia

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

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Sánchez in Slovenia, so it cannot narrow Slovenia's 1,585 volumes by date — see Slovenia's own page for all of it.

Italy

14 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

50,828 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1700s and 1920s — the decades Sánchez is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Sánchez. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

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 Sánchez 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 49
  • 1901–1910 86
  • 1911–1920 460
  • 1921–1930 1,908
  • 1931–1940 1,642
  • 1941–1950 2,553
  • 1951–1960 3,690
  • 1961–1970 7,983
  • 1971–1980 6,179
  • 1981–1990 5,460
  • 1991–2000 5,250

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
France
Belgium
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 → …
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 → …

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 Sánchez on the map →

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