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Timmerman

Timmerman, also written Timmermans, Zimmermann, Timmermann. Attested in United States of America, Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark, borne by about 10,551 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.

TimmermansZimmermannTimmermann

Only sounds alike

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

TimermanTemmerman

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.

  • French · German · Dutch 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.

  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q1441477 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.

  • Dutch what the English entry says it is from
  • occupations what the Dutch entry says it is from
  • English · Dutch 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.

Timmerman on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87348259. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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 5 countries: United States of America, Belgium, France, Spain, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedSpain — 45 peopleFrance — 1,152 peopleBelgium — 1,785 peopleUnited States of America — 7,569 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. 1,785 people in 111 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Brugge with 220. 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.
111 places drawn, the largest being Brugge, Gent, Maldegem, Antwerpen, Oostkamp, Beernem, Oostende, Zedelgem, Aalter, DoornikOpwijk — 10Mechelen — 10Charleroi — 11Zulte — 11Tielt — 11Middelkerke — 11Genk — 12Moeskroen — 12Kortemark — 12Blankenberge — 12Deinze — 13Bredene — 13Hasselt — 14Eeklo — 14Leuven — 14Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht — 15De Haan — 15Evergem — 16Roeselare — 16Dendermonde — 17Jabbeke — 18Lede — 19Waregem — 19Merelbeke-Melle — 22Diksmuide — 23Kortrijk — 26Lievegem — 27Aalst — 32Knokke-Heist — 42Damme — 42Doornik — 43Aalter — 43Zedelgem — 44Oostende — 47Beernem — 52Oostkamp — 59Antwerpen — 63Maldegem — 100Gent — 123Brugge — 220

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

7,569 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

400,424 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1830s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Timmerman is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Timmerman. 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 →

Belgium

1,785 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

20,977 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Timmerman is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Timmerman. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

France

1,152 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

561 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1730s, 1770s, 1810s, 1830s, 1840s, 1860s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s — the decades Timmerman is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Timmerman. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

70 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1960s, 1980s and 2020s — the decades Timmerman is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Timmerman. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

319 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1920s, 1940s, 1970s and 1990s — the decades Timmerman is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Timmerman. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial. See everything this atlas holds for Denmark →

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 38
  • 1901–1910 53
  • 1911–1920 60
  • 1921–1930 94
  • 1931–1940 107
  • 1941–1950 131
  • 1951–1960 157
  • 1961–1970 137
  • 1971–1980 134
  • 1981–1990 112
  • 1991–2000 129

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
Belgium
France
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 Timmerman on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable