Surname Sunday 3.0 - Hillinger/Hilinger

Starting a new version of my Surname Sunday posts. Hopefully these will be interesting to everyone. I'll go over major versions of my surname, and the places they are from, and the stats as found at the site Forbears.

Hillinger/Hilinger: 

According to Forbears, the name Hillinger is held by 1,361 people in the world. The largest number of which live in Austria. Germany is the second most populous, which is where my grandfather was born, and the US where we now live, is third. 

Here's the distribution of the Hillinger name throughout the world. The darker the color, the bigger the representation of the name:

Here is the distribution in Austria:

And here is the distribution in Germany, where my grandfather was born:

By all rights, I should look at the numbers in Poland, because that's where my grandfather's grandmother, from whom we get the Hillinger name, was likely born. However, there don't appear to be any now, so that map is entirely grey. But in this instance, her name was spelled with only one L, so I also did a glance of the distribution of the name Hilinger as well.

According to Forbears, the name Hilinger is only held by 92 people in the world. The largest number of which live in Spain. There are only three other countries with people using the name Hilinger in the world, Austria, Poland, and Sweden. I include this because I find it curious, with a possibility that perhaps our family has some Sephardic heritage because of this connection? I have no proof aside from this result, but it still fascinates me.

Hilinger:

The distribution across the world:

And the distribution in Spain:

Now, these are modern numbers, so it may mean nothing at all, but it still makes me wonder. I had hoped my DNA results might confirm this guess, but I presume it's either so wrapped up in my Eastern European Jewish results, or so slight that it just doesn't show. Or I never inherited that strain from my father. I don't know that this is a mystery that will ever be solved, given how hard it is to find records for this side of the family, but I can hope.