Record Atlas
United States of America · Spain · Poland · Denmark

Weir

Weir. Attested in United States of America, Spain, Poland, Denmark, borne by about 18,992 people in the registers this map holds.

The spellings of Wear

This is the one list the atlas keeps of which spellings are the same name, and what each rests on. Case, spacing, hyphens and apostrophes are not counted as separate spellings, so De Franceschi and Defranceschi are one form. An accent is: a priest's Lereña is not a clerk's Lerena.

Searching for this name? Try every one of: Wear · Weare

The same family

One record, or the family's own tree, writes one person or family both ways.

  • Wear
    what it rests on
    • the form used for the London saddler line in the 1851 and 1871 censuses United Kingdom · the Luwinski family archive

Met on this line's records

Met on a record of this family's line by the archive that read it.

  • Weare
    what it rests on
    • the third-quarter 1842 Stepney marriage index carries the name this way; the identification with the line rests on other facts, not on the spelling United Kingdom · Stepney · 1842 · the Luwinski family archive
2 leads, never yet seen on a record — worth searching, never worth writing down alone

Plausible and never seen on a record. Search it; never write a data row on it alone.

  • Ware
    what it rests on
    • listed because a Y-DNA project was searched on it; never seen on a record of this line United Kingdom · the Luwinski family archive
  • Weir this page
    what it rests on
    • listed because a Y-DNA project was searched on it; never seen on a record of this line United Kingdom · the Luwinski family archive
6 possible variants, unverified — names that only sound alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence. Nobody has checked these against a record. Treat one as a lead to look for, never as a finding.

WerWirWairWeerWerrWeier

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.

  • English 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

Q17122937 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.

  • No origin given the entry exists and its surname template names nothing the name is from — 52,640 of the 78,628 entries this atlas matched are silent this way, which is the dictionary's gap and not a judgement about the name
  • 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.

Weir on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 91312465. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

On the map

  • A country that counted the name
  • Attested by a register, not counted
  • A place of this name

Where it is borne, and where a record names it. 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 dashed ring is attested by a register but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 4 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.

It is also the name of a place

The places are drawn on the map above. A dot there 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.

  • Weir India pop. 19,385
  • Weir United States of America pop. 647
  • Weir United Kingdom
  • Weir Canada
  • Weer Austria pop. 1,539 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Weier Switzerland pop. 5 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

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

18,881 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

599,235 of 688,143 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1750s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Weir is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Weir. 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

107 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 Weir in Spain, so it cannot narrow Spain's 45,312 volumes by date — see Spain's own page for all of it.

Poland

4 Borne — a state counted them — Nazwiska występujące w rejestrze PESEL (z uwzględnieniem osób zmarłych).

Whose archive to write to

2,171 of 15,758 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1900s — the decades Weir is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Weir. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Poland →

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 Weir in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 23,346 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

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
Spain
Poland
Denmark

Find Weir on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable