Record Atlas
Belgium · France

Vincké

Vincké, also written Finke. Attested in Belgium, France, borne by about 1,092 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.

Finke

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.

VinkeVyncke

Only sounds alike

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

VinckVinekeVonckeVijncke

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.

  • Dutch · German 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.

  • occupational surname kind of surname
  • Named after fowler · bell-ringer what the name is from
  • Read about it on Wikipedia ↗ an article, with its own sources

Q56255701 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Finke, FinkeFinke — 1Finke — 233
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.

  • Finke Australia pop. 233 a spelling of the name
  • Finke Hungary a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 2 countries: Belgium, FranceFrance — 258 peopleBelgium — 834 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 2 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. 839 people in 73 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Brugge with 53. 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.
73 places drawn, the largest being Brugge, Gent, Beernem, Kortrijk, Hamme, Dendermonde, Antwerpen, Zedelgem, Blankenberge, OostendeAvelgem — 7Jabbeke — 7Hastière — 8Wevelgem — 8Kortemark — 8Willebroek — 8Andenne — 9Lokeren — 9Merelbeke-Melle — 9Lievegem — 9Gistel — 9Bornem — 9Lierde — 10Middelkerke — 10Ichtegem — 10Oostkamp — 10Temse — 11Lochristi — 11Nazareth-De Pinte — 11Lebbeke — 11Roeselare — 11Deinze — 13Zwevegem — 13Mechelen — 13Sint-Niklaas — 15Aalter — 15Geraardsbergen — 17Menen — 17Charleroi — 18Zottegem — 19Oostende — 19Blankenberge — 19Zedelgem — 20Antwerpen — 25Dendermonde — 26Hamme — 27Kortrijk — 37Beernem — 44Gent — 47Brugge — 53

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

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

Whose archive to write to

15,231 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1570s, 1820s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1900s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Vincké is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Vincké. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

France

258 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 Vincké in France, so it cannot narrow France's 1,513 volumes by date — see France'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 14
  • 1901–1910 12
  • 1911–1920 20
  • 1921–1930 25
  • 1931–1940 18
  • 1941–1950 26
  • 1951–1960 43
  • 1961–1970 19
  • 1971–1980 30
  • 1981–1990 30
  • 1991–2000 21

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.

Find Vincké on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable