- 3.1 British Isles
- 3.2 Scandinavia
- 3.3 mainland Western Europe
- 3.4 Ireland
- 3.5 Eastern Europe
- 3.6 The Americas
- 3.7 Oceania
- 3.8 elsewhere in the world
- 3.9 The Jewish name Hillman
The name occurs with varying frequency and spelling from the Scandinavian countries through the “Germanic arc” along the western European maritime area. It is difficult to ascertain how related the Scandinavian instances are to the rest of Western Europe, Eastern Europe that would seem to be mainly of Jewish origin, and across the narrow Channel to Britain.
Hell in Old North Germanic languages (that include German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, but not Finnish) means clear, but also light or fair-skinned or haired. Hild, Hilt and Helm relate to accoutrements of war and the people who wore or wielded them. Are there also links back to incoming soldiery or people from the far north who were light-complexioned and flaxen-haired? We simply do not know and have as yet found no evidence either to support or to refute this.
Apart from Scandinavia and Germany, the name Hillman occurs at low frequency in other West European countries, except possibly of secondary occurrence, deriving from recent immigrants in low numbers. The information given below (Table 1) is merely indicative, given that it is not possible to get current and directly comparable information from each country. The numbers are the total records over several centuries, not those present today.
Table 1 Indicative figures on numbers of Hillman records in Western European countries
NB. Hillman figures include Hillman, Hillman
& Illman records, from exact searches on Family Search.
In
terms of the proportion of the total population, the indications are that the
name is most common in Western Europe in the United Kingdom (Hillman), followed
by Finland (Illman), Sweden (Hillman), and Denmark (Hillmann).
[i] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-in-europe/