Where Kieffers live: the geography of the name

The Kieffer name was born in the borderlands between France, Germany and Luxembourg, where the local dialect word for the cooper was Kieffer. It is still most common there today. Emigration carried it much further, to the United States, Canada, Latin America and beyond.

France: Moselle and Alsace

French birth records give the clearest picture. According to Filae, which draws on data from INSEE, the French statistics office, 10,440 people named Kieffer were born in France between 1891 and 1990, in 97 of the country’s départements. That makes Kieffer the 494th most common surname in France.

Births by period show steady growth until the post-war decades:

The name is concentrated in two départements, Moselle (Lorraine) and Bas-Rhin (northern Alsace). Filae’s genealogy database, which counts individuals recorded in family trees rather than living people, shows the same pattern:

Paris appears because people from every region moved to the capital. Haut-Rhin, southern Alsace, has far fewer Kieffers than the north.

Luxembourg

In Luxembourg, Kieffer is an everyday name with a clear meaning: researchers on the Luxembourg surname atlas project give it as the Luxembourgish word Kéifer, the cooper. Several Luxembourgers named Kieffer are well known, among them the historian Monique Kieffer, born in 1952, and the actress Julie Kieffer, born in 1992.

Germany

The name is also found in Germany, in both spellings, Kieffer and Kiefer. German Kieffers include the history painter Johann Jakob Kieffer (1814–1891), of the Düsseldorf school, and Ludwig Kieffer (1894–1967), who studied the dialect of Pirmasens in the Palatinate.

The United States and the Americas

In the nineteenth century, many families from Alsace and Lorraine emigrated to North America. Some went in organised groups. In 1844, Henri Castro founded Castroville, Texas, with settlers from Alsace. The town still calls itself “the Little Alsace of Texas” and keeps the Alsatian dialect alive.

Kieffers also settled in Pennsylvania. The nurseryman Peter Kieffer of Roxborough, near Philadelphia, grew the seedling that became the famous Kieffer pear, which first fruited in 1863.

The United States census counts the people who carry the name today:

In 2010 the name ranked 5,241st among American surnames.

Elsewhere in the Americas, the Argentine writer Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer (1935–2002) and the Canadian politician Robert Kieffer, born in 1946, show how far the name has spread. Philippe Kieffer, hero of D-Day, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1899, to an Alsatian father. His story is told among famous Kieffers.

Tracing your own branch

Figures show where the name is common. They cannot show where your own family came from. For that, the genealogy guide lists the archives to search in France, Luxembourg and Germany.