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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • Reduced form of Dutch van Kampen, a habitational name from the city of Kampen in the Netherlands, on the east coast of the Ijsselmeer in the province of Overijssel.
  • North German : Kampen is also the name of a village on the island of Sylt in Schleswig-Holstein. However, the German name is more likely to be a topographic name, from the plural or an inflected from of Low German kamp ‘enclosed field’ (see Kamp 1).
  • Norwegian : habitational name from any of numerous farmsteads in southeastern Norway named Kampen, from the definite singular form of kamp ‘round hill top’, ‘boulder’.

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