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1,206,134 people, 3,181 communes

Where your family is from, by your grandparents' surnames

Type your grandparents' family names: both grandfathers, and both grandmothers by their maiden names. The map of Romania shows where most people with the same names are registered.

The names stay on your phone or computer. They are not sent anywhere or kept.

What's in the register

A million people, each with a village#

People in Romania who work for themselves with papers usually appear in the national trade register: as sole traders, individual or family businesses or, in the early 1990s, family associations. The line keeps the person's name and the place where they registered their business.

The public file of 19 October 2026 holds about 1,206,134 such people; anyone listed more than once under the same name in the same commune is counted once. The register also keeps closed businesses back to 1990, so the map shows where people have been registered over the past 35 years. Only 9.1% are in Bucharest. The rest are spread across the country, many in villages: beekeepers, farmers, craftsmen, taxi drivers, accountants. The map shows how many there are in each commune. A commune (comună) is Romania's rural municipality, usually a handful of villages; there are 3,181 communes and towns in 41 counties (județe) and Bucharest.

One name, three regions

Pop, Popa, Popescu#

Pop is the commonest name in the register in Maramureș, Bistrița-Năsăud, Sălaj, Cluj and Satu Mare, in the north-west. It has 7,642 bearers, and in Maramureș it is 7.5 times as frequent as the national average.

Popa has 9,313 bearers, spread over the south and east. It is most frequent in Alba, 2.2 times the national average.

Popescu, with 6,722 bearers, gathers in Gorj, 5.5 times the national average, and in the neighbouring counties below the mountains. In Gorj it is seven times more frequent than the county’s second name. All three come from popă, the old Romanian word for priest; -escu marks a family name, roughly "of the family of", a little like "-son" in English.

The same name in two languages

Kovács and Fieraru#

Kovács means smith in Hungarian, the language of a large minority in central Romania. It has 1,982 bearers in the register; relative to population it is most frequent in Covasna, 10.1 times the national average.

Fieraru, the same trade in Romanian, has 274 bearers; relative to population it is most frequent in Olt, 9.7 times the national average. The map shows where a name is common; the language someone speaks or their origin are other questions.

Endings

-escu, -eanu, -iuc, -aru#

The ending of a name has a geography too. Tap one to see what share of the people in each commune carries it.

How often it is right

The test on real people#

Before any map, the method was tried on people in the register it had not seen. Each kind of test had 600 trials, each in a commune picked at random among those with at least 40 people in the register, Bucharest excluded. All the people used in the trials were taken out of the data, the model was rebuilt without them, and it had to guess their commune from their family names alone.

With four names from one commune, half the guesses landed within 48 km of it, and 16% hit the commune itself. With two names from one commune and two from another, like a family with two branches, half landed within 71 km of the nearer one. With a single name, 137 km.

600 tests per row; the model was rebuilt without the people tested. With two communes, the distance is to the nearer one.
Names given	Half the guesses within	8 in 10 within	The commune itself	Best fixed guess
1 name	137 km	270 km	4%	178 km
4 names, one commune	48 km	132 km	16%	181 km
2 + 2 names, two communes	71 km	163 km	14%	129 km

For comparison, the best fixed guess, the same place for everyone, stays 181 km away with four names and 178 km with one.

The zones on the map are corrected. Uncorrected, the 80% zone would have held the true commune in only 29% of trials, probably because names repeat among relatives in a village and the model counts the same information twice. Corrected, the 50% zone held it in 44% of trials and the 80% zone in 81% (all three kinds of test together, on trials not used for tuning; in the two-commune test, holding one of them counts).

How often the zone held the true commune. Line: what the zone promises; bar: how often it held, on tests not used for tuning.

A separate test, on other data: 5,346 people born in Romania between 1880 and 1959 whose birthplace is recorded in Wikidata. From their family name alone, today’s register put them a typical 133 km from where they were born, against 154 km for the best fixed guess. Where names are common today still carries a trace of where families lived a century ago.

Each county's names

The names that say a county#

Pick a county or tap it on the map: the list shows its most distinctive surnames, those at least three times as frequent there as the national average, with at least 40 bearers in the county.

Pick a county

What it cannot say

The limits of the map#

The register is not the whole population. It is made of people who have worked for themselves since 1990, and the place is that of the business, which may be the person's home, not their birthplace.

Two people with the same name in the same commune may not be related, and a family may have moved long ago. Very common names (Popa, Radu, Stan, Dumitru) are everywhere and narrow the map very little.

The Republic of Moldova is not in the register. Names with fewer than five bearers are not used, and where a name has only one or two bearers in a commune they are counted at county level, so that nobody can be found.

Questions#

Why the grandmothers’ maiden names?

After marrying, a Romanian grandmother usually took her husband’s name. Her maiden name is her own family’s name, another branch with its own place. With the married name, the same name would be counted twice.

My grandfather's name doesn't appear.

Names with fewer than five bearers in the register are not used, so that no single person can be found. Names spelled differently abroad (Popesco, Popeskou) or changed on emigration may be missing too; diacritics do not matter, they are removed. The map is made from the other names.

My family is from the Republic of Moldova.

The trade register is Romania's, so Moldova does not appear. A Moldovan name may still be frequent in Romania's own Moldavia, just across the Prut, and the map will show it there.

What happens to the names I type?

Nothing. The calculation runs on your phone or computer. The names go into a link only when you press a share button, after the # sign, a part of the address the browser does not send to the server.

Where is Bucharest?

Bucharest counts as one place, all its sectors together. Many people in Bucharest have families from all over the country, so the map rarely settles there.

How it is calculated#

For each commune the map starts from how many people it has in the register. Each name then multiplies the commune’s chance by the share the name has there, smoothed towards the national average so that small communes do not weigh too much. The product is raised to the power 0.6, a power chosen on half the tests and checked on the other half, so that the zones hold what they promise.

The data: the companies file of Romania’s trade register (ONRC), as of 19 October 2026. Only people are kept, not companies: sole traders, individual and family businesses, family associations and individuals registered in the 1990s. The family name is the first word of the registered name; a person is kept only if the second word is a first name seen at least 20 times, so labels like "Activitate independentă" (self-employed) do not become surnames. Someone registered more than once in the same commune is counted once.

1,206,134 people gave 78,375 family names; 26,352 have at least five bearers and are on the map, covering 92.3% of the people. The page holds no first names, addresses, codes or business dates.