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Wolff

Wolff, also written Wolfe, Wolf, Volf. Attested in United States of America, France, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 33,510 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.

WolfeWolfVolf

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.

VolffWólf

Only sounds alike

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

WulffWolffe

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 · 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.

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

Q2588593 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.

  • given names · nicknames what the German entry says it is from
  • English · Dutch · German 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.

Wolff on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 87034228. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

5 places drawn, the largest being Wolf, Wolff, Wolfe, Wolf, WolfWolf — 1Wolf — 1Wolfe — 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.

  • Wolff United States of America
  • Wolf Austria pop. 25 a spelling of the name
  • Wolfe 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 8 countries: United States of America, France, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 4 peopleNorway — 276 peopleBelgium — 287 peopleSpain — 301 peoplePoland — 930 peopleFrance — 9,897 peopleUnited States of America — 21,815 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 8 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. 287 people in 31 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Charleroi with 18. 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.
31 places drawn, the largest being Charleroi, Luik, Büllingen, Antwerpen, Musson, Aubange, Raeren, Saint-Léger, Habay, ElseneVerviers — 5Lontzen — 5Chaudfontaine — 5Schaarbeek — 5Vorst — 5Oudergem — 5Couvin — 6Virton — 6Bütgenbach — 7Seraing — 7Gent — 7Sint-Pieters-Woluwe — 7Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe — 7Etterbeek — 7Messancy — 8Spa — 8Watermaal-Bosvoorde — 8Ukkel — 8Attert — 9Kelmis — 9Pont-à-Celles — 10Elsene — 10Habay — 11Saint-Léger — 11Raeren — 12Aubange — 14Musson — 15Antwerpen — 16Büllingen — 18Luik — 18Charleroi — 18

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

21,815 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 Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. 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 →

France

9,897 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 Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Poland

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

Whose archive to write to

15,518 of 15,686 volumes held for Poland overlap the 1530s, 1600s, 1640s, 1660s, 1670s, 1690s, 1700s, 1720s, 1740s, 1760s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s — the decades Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. 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 →

Spain

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

Whose archive to write to

400 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1950s and 1980s — the decades Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

21,332 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1740s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s — the decades Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Cemeteries and burials, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Norway

276 Borne — a state counted them — Etternavn brukt av 200 personer eller flere (SSB tabell 12891).

Whose archive to write to

Italy

4 Borne — a state counted them — Italian comuni publishing their residents' surnames as open data, indexed by the national catalogue dati.gov.it..

Whose archive to write to

658,591 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1980s — the decades Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Denmark

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

Whose archive to write to

3,731 of 4,099 volumes held for Denmark overlap the 1550s, 1720s, 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Wolff is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Wolff. 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 570
  • 1901–1910 884
  • 1911–1920 688
  • 1921–1930 923
  • 1931–1940 862
  • 1941–1950 978
  • 1951–1960 1,144
  • 1961–1970 1,131
  • 1971–1980 951
  • 1981–1990 867
  • 1991–2000 899

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
Poland
  • Pomerania and Danzig 7 eras Duchy of Pomerania → Swedish Pomerania in the west; Brandenburg-Prussia in the east → Prussia → German Empire → …
  • Bohemia 6 eras Kingdom of Bohemia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Sudetenland and the Reichsprotektorat → …
  • Posen — Prussian Poland 8 eras Poland → Prussia → Duchy of Warsaw → German Empire → …
  • Galicia 6 eras Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia → Poland → Austria → German and Soviet occupation → …
  • Moravia and Silesia 6 eras Margraviate of Moravia → Austria → Czechoslovakia → Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren → …
  • East Prussia 4 eras State of the Teutonic Order → Duchy, then Kingdom, of Prussia → German Empire → Russia in the north; Poland in the south; Lithuania at Memel
  • Silesia 6 eras Habsburg Bohemian crown lands → Prussia → German Empire → Divided → …
  • Congress Poland — the Russian partition 7 eras Russian Empire → Duchy of Warsaw → Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with Russia → Poland, restored → …
Belgium
Norway
  • Norway 3 eras Denmark–Norway → Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution → Norway

Regions are also drawn in 2 other countries where this name is attested, further down the register's own list. The order here is how many people a register counted, so the countries above are the ones the name most belongs to.

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

Find Wolff on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable