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Collu

Collu. Attested in France, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, borne by about 294 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, spelt two ways

One systematic substitution — s for z, w for v, ch for h — where BOTH spellings are independently attested surnames. Kosina and Kozina are one man in two clerks' handwriting. Stronger than sounding alike, weaker than somebody having checked.

Kollu

Only sounds alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence.

CollCalluColauColeuCollaColliColloColly

What Wiktionary says this name is

Copied from the surname template on Wiktionary, not worked out here, and not from its etymology prose. Anyone may edit it; the page and the revision it was read at are linked below.

  • Sardinian what the Italian entry says it is from
  • Italian recorded as a surname in these languages

    A language here is the language of the NAME, not a country a family came from — the same caveat the Wikidata section carries, and worth repeating rather than assumed read.

Collu on Wiktionary ↗ — read at revision 70719003. Text from Wiktionary, by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is also the name of a place

This is as close to an origin as this map will go. A surname that is also a place name often came from it — and often did not: plenty are occupations or patronymics that happen to collide with a place, and plenty of places are named after a family rather than the other way round. It is a fact with a source, which is more than an etymology page offers.

  • Collo Algeria pop. 29,354 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Colli Italy pop. 639 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Colla Italy pop. 275 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Collo Italy pop. 9 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Coll Argentina only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Coll Spain only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 4 countries: France, Belgium, Italy, DenmarkDenmark — attested, not countedItaly — 16 peopleBelgium — 29 peopleFrance — 249 people
A dot is a country, not a place. It sits at the country's centre because a national register counts a country; nothing here says where in it these people are. A hollow ring is attested but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each, and a family archive finds a name without counting heads. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 4 countries where the eleven registers and eight archives behind this atlas attest the name. Most of the world has no surname register this project can read, and the ones that do and will not are listed with the reason.
Belgium, by commune. 29 people in 3 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Genk with 11. This is the only country here that can be drawn this way — every other register counts a country and stops, so a blank elsewhere is a gap in what states publish, not in the name.
3 places drawn, the largest being Genk, Charleroi, Le RoeulxLe Roeulx — 8Charleroi — 10Genk — 11

Country by country

Each country below can carry up to three different kinds of evidence, and none of them is the same claim. A register is a head-count — a state counted these people. A record is one document naming the surname on that ground, narrower evidence and often much older. And a volume overlapping these dates is a document from the right place and years — never a document known to name this surname. None of the three ever means the name exists in that country and nowhere else, or that it exists nowhere but here.

France

249 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

254 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1850s, 1870s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1960s and 1980s — the decades Collu is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Collu. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Belgium

29 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

1,018 of 24,426 volumes held for Belgium overlap the 1910s and 1940s — the decades Collu is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Collu. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records. See everything this atlas holds for Belgium →

Italy

16 Borne — a state counted them — Italian comuni publishing their residents' surnames as open data, indexed by the national catalogue dati.gov.it..

Whose archive to write to

860,346 of 1,288,913 volumes held for Italy overlap the 1760s, 1790s, 1800s, 1810s, 1830s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Collu is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Collu. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for Italy →

Denmark

Borne — a state counted them — Navne registreret i Danmark, January 2020 (Danmarks Statistik, republished by Digitaliseringsstyrelsen).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Collu in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 4,099 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

When it was being born, in France

INSEE counts births by surname and decade from the état civil, 1891 to 2000 — the only dated evidence in this dataset. A name that starts at zero and climbs arrived; a name that falls to nothing left, died out, or emigrated, and the decade it stops is the decade to stop searching. It counts births registered in France, so a family that emigrated in 1900 simply stops appearing, which is information rather than a defect. This name's first French births fall in 1901–1910 and its last in 1991–2000.

  • 1891–1900 —
  • 1901–1910 2
  • 1911–1920 3
  • 1921–1930 8
  • 1931–1940 10
  • 1941–1950 13
  • 1951–1960 33
  • 1961–1970 41
  • 1971–1980 48
  • 1981–1990 54
  • 1991–2000 37

Whose archive held that ground, and when

Every surname site can tell you a name is common somewhere. This one also knows which filing system held that ground in which years — and those are the two halves of one question: my people were called this, they were there, so who has the paper, and for which century. A name in Croatia before 1881 may sit in a military series and not a county one; a name in the Netherlands before 1811 has no civil record at all, only a baptism.

This is about the ground, not about your family. A register counting a name in a country says nothing about which village. And these are the pieces of a country this atlas has drawn, which in a large one may be a corner of it — Acadia reaches into Maine and is not a statement about the United States, and Bohemia's ground crosses into Poland. Each region's own page says which ground it covers. Where a country is missing below, nothing covers it yet.

  • Carnia, Friuli 6 eras Patriarchate of Aquileia → Republic of Venice → Austria → Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Campania — Caserta and Naples 5 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → …
  • Eastern Sicily — Catania 4 eras Kingdom of Sicily → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Kingdom of Italy → Italy
  • Calabria 4 eras Kingdom of Naples → Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples → Kingdom of the Two Sicilies → Italy
  • Carniola and the Slovene lands 8 eras Inner Austria → Austria → The Illyrian Provinces → Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia → …
  • Denmark 4 eras Denmark–Norway → Denmark, after the loss of Norway → Prussia, then the German Empire → Denmark

Find Collu on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable