Record Atlas
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Volf

Volf, also written Wolff. Attested in Slovenia, France, United States of America, Spain, Denmark, borne by about 923 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.

Wolff

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.

WólfVolff

Only sounds alike

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

VelfVulfVolfa

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.

  • Czech 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

Q21452247 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

4 places drawn, the largest being Wolf, Wolff, Wolf, WolfWolf — 1Wolf — 1Wolff — 1Wolf — 25
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.

  • Wolf Austria pop. 25 a spelling of the name
  • Wolff United States of America a spelling of the name
  • Wolf Germany a spelling of the name
  • Wolf United States of America a spelling of the name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 5 countries: Slovenia, France, United States of America, Spain, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedSpain — 26 peopleUnited States of America — 211 peopleFrance — 250 peopleSlovenia — 436 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.

Slovenia

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

Whose archive to write to

797 of 1,585 volumes held for Slovenia overlap the 1590s, 1730s, 1750s, 1780s, 1800s, 1820s, 1830s, 1860s and 1930s — the decades Volf is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Volf. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Slovenia →

France

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

Whose archive to write to

1,007 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1740s, 1770s, 1790s, 1820s, 1830s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the decades Volf is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Volf. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

United States of America

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

Whose archive to write to

502,490 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1730s, 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 2020s — the decades Volf is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Volf. 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 →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

17 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1980s — the decades Volf is attested here. None is known to name Volf: 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

2,983 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1550s, 1720s, 1760s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1820s, 1830s, 1850s, 1860s, 1910s, 1930s, 1950s and 1970s — the decades Volf is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Volf. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Probate, land and notarial, Cemeteries and burials. 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 13
  • 1901–1910 21
  • 1911–1920 9
  • 1921–1930 24
  • 1931–1940 16
  • 1941–1950 32
  • 1951–1960 23
  • 1961–1970 33
  • 1971–1980 33
  • 1981–1990 21
  • 1991–2000 25

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.

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 → …
France
United States of America
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 Volf on the map →

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