Bolam
surname · Latin script
Meaning: person from Bolam, County Durham or Northumberland; the place name means ‘place by the tree trunks’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Bolam is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
person from Bolam, County Durham or Northumberland; the place name means ‘place by the tree trunks’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Bolam is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Bolam (Durham) or Bolham (Nottinghamshire); first attested Gilbert de Boolum 1205 P (Northumberland)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Gilbert de Boolum 1205 P (Nb); Richard de Bolekam 1279 RH (O); John Bollom 1420 IpmY. From Bolam (Du), or Bolham (Nt).
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In Portuguese, third-person plural present indicative of bolar
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latin, accusative singular of Bōla
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- James Bolamb. 1839GBBorn: May 1839 in Newcastle, England; Died: 29 August 1930 in St Helen's, Drumchapel, Dumbartonshire, Scotland
- Robert Bolamb. 1871British medical doctor, academic and British Army officer
- Alice Bolam Prestonb. 1888USAmerican artist and children's book illustrator
- Ken Bolamb. 1901GBBritish composer
- Beatrice Bolamb. 1919politician
- James Bolamb. 1935GBBritish actor
- Robyn Bolamb. 1953GBpoet
- Emily Bolamb. 1969GBBritish creator
- Emma Bolamb. 1970GBBritish vaccinologist
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 12 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 360 | #60,433 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 339 | #56,392 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 314 | #63,524 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 107 | #21,804 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 44 | #48,207 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bolam mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Bolam, County Durham or Northumberland; the place name means ‘place by the tree trunks’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Bolam have the most bearers?
- Bolam is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Bolam?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/bolamThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Bolam”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.