Record Atlas
United States of America · Spain · France · Norway · Belgium · Poland · Italy · Denmark

Tahir

Tahir. Attested in United States of America, Spain, France, Norway, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 4,002 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.

TahyrTachirThahir

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.

  • Turkish 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.

Q21448981 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

Where it came from

No place of this name is in the gazetteer, so this map says nothing about where the name came from. Search a surname anywhere else and you will be told an origin — that it is Latin, or Italian, or means «joyful». That is etymology, it is usually unsourced, and it is a different question from the one answered here.

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 8 countries: United States of America, Spain, France, Norway, Belgium, Poland, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 6 peoplePoland — 7 peopleBelgium — 365 peopleNorway — 381 peopleFrance — 545 peopleSpain — 714 peopleUnited States of America — 1,984 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. 365 people in 31 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 68. 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.
31 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Sint-Niklaas, Fosses-la-Ville, Brussel, Anderlecht, Luik, Tienen, RetieHasselt — 5Herstal — 5Dalhem — 5La Louvière — 5Ganshoren — 5Philippeville — 6Florennes — 6Sambreville — 6Andenne — 6Genk — 6Verviers — 6Charleroi — 6Ukkel — 6Mechelen — 6Oostende — 7Dilbeek — 7Evere — 7Sint-Truiden — 8Schaarbeek — 9Namen — 10Gent — 10Retie — 10Tienen — 13Luik — 14Anderlecht — 15Brussel — 16Fosses-la-Ville — 20Sint-Niklaas — 20Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — 22Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 30Antwerpen — 68

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

1,984 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

17,116 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1960s and 1990s — the decades Tahir is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Tahir. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

Spain

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

France

545 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 Tahir in France, so it cannot narrow France's 1,513 volumes by date — see France's own page for all of it.

Norway

381 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Belgium

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

Poland

7 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 Tahir in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,686 volumes by date — see Poland'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 Tahir in Italy, so it cannot narrow Italy's 1,288,913 volumes by date — see Italy'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 Tahir 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 1911–1920 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 —
  • 1911–1920 3
  • 1921–1930 —
  • 1931–1940 2
  • 1941–1950 8
  • 1951–1960 40
  • 1961–1970 81
  • 1971–1980 118
  • 1981–1990 130
  • 1991–2000 163

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
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway
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 → …

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 Tahir on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable