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Yakub

Yakub, also written Jacob, Jakob. Attested in United States of America, Belgium, Denmark, borne by about 307 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.

JacobJakob

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.

Yacub

Only sounds alike

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

JakubYakabYakobYaqubYakoubYakubaYakubiYakubu

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.

  • Russian · Belarusian · Ukrainian 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.

Q21476672 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

It is also the name of a place

1 place drawn, the largest being JacobJacob — 1
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.

  • Jacob United States of America a spelling of the name
  • Jakub Slovakia only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: United States of America, Belgium, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedBelgium — 62 peopleUnited States of America — 245 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 3 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. 62 people in 5 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Antwerpen with 24. 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.
5 places drawn, the largest being Antwerpen, Schaarbeek, Brussel, Gent, TemseTemse — 5Gent — 5Brussel — 7Schaarbeek — 21Antwerpen — 24

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

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

Whose archive to write to

217,495 of 528,875 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1890s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — the decades Yakub is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Yakub. 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 →

Belgium

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

Whose archive to write to

9,642 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1710s, 1790s, 1880s, 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1960s — the decades Yakub is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Yakub. 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 →

Denmark

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

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

Yakub is attested in Denmark in the 1960s. Not one of the 4,099 volumes this atlas holds for Denmark covers those years — worth knowing before an afternoon is spent on Denmark's shelf rather than after.

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
Belgium
Denmark
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

Find Yakub on the map →

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