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Troy

Troy. Attested in United States of America, France, Spain, Denmark, Ireland, borne by about 8,839 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.

Troi

Only sounds alike

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

TroTryTrayTreyTrouTruyTeroy

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.

Q20727180 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.

  • Old French what the English entry says it is from
  • English 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.

Troy on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 91957839. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Troy, TroyTroy — 1Troy — 83,280
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.

  • Troy United States of America pop. 83,280
  • Troy United Kingdom

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 5 countries: United States of America, France, Spain, Denmark, IrelandDenmark — attested, not countedIreland — attested, not countedSpain — 84 peopleFrance — 646 peopleUnited States of America — 8,109 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.

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

8,109 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

275,853 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1900s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s — the decades Troy is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Troy. 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 →

France

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

Whose archive to write to

168 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1750s and 1800s — the decades Troy is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Troy. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

40 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1970s — the decades Troy is attested here. None is known to name Troy: a volume overlapping these years is a document from the right place and time, not a confirmed match. Worth an afternoon.

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 Troy in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

Ireland

Borne — a state counted them — Surnames of babies with ten or more occurrences, 2023–2025 (CSO, VSA110).

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

Troy is attested in Ireland in the 1890s, 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Not one of the 1,568 volumes this atlas holds for Ireland covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Ireland's shelf rather than after.

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 66
  • 1901–1910 71
  • 1911–1920 41
  • 1921–1930 74
  • 1931–1940 36
  • 1941–1950 71
  • 1951–1960 76
  • 1961–1970 59
  • 1971–1980 69
  • 1981–1990 37
  • 1991–2000 46

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
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark
Ireland
  • Ireland — the whole island 4 eras Kingdom of Ireland, under the English crown → United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland → United Kingdom → Irish Free State and Republic in the south; Northern Ireland in the six counties

No record region is drawn yet for Spain — which is a gap in this atlas and not a statement about that country.

Find Troy on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable