Record Atlas
Poland · United States of America · Denmark

Kolber

Kolber. Attested in Poland, United States of America, Denmark, borne by about 1,290 people in the registers this map holds.

The spellings of Kolbe

This is the one list the atlas keeps of which spellings are the same name, and what each rests on. Case, spacing, hyphens and apostrophes are not counted as separate spellings, so De Franceschi and Defranceschi are one form. An accent is: a priest's Lereña is not a clerk's Lerena.

Searching for this name? Try every one of: Kolbe · Colbe · Colbee · Colby · Kolbee · Kolber

The same family

One record, or the family's own tree, writes one person or family both ways.

  • Kolbe
    what it rests on
    • the family's own spelling across Cape, Orange Free State and London records South Africa, United Kingdom · the Booyzen family archive

Met on this line's records

Met on a record of this family's line by the archive that read it.

  • Colbe
    what it rests on
    • a printed 1876 history of the Orange Free State writes the name Colbe once, where the same volume writes Kolbe seventeen times; the archive's own notes record the same form in a household's baptism entries South Africa · 1866-1876 · the Booyzen family archive
  • Colbee
    what it rests on
    • written in the baptism entries of one household's seven children, Barkly East district (the entries also vary the mother's forenames) South Africa · the Booyzen family archive
  • Colby
    what it rests on
    • written in the baptism entries of one household's seven children, Barkly East district (the entries also vary the mother's forenames) South Africa · the Booyzen family archive
  • Kolbee
    what it rests on
    • written in the baptism entries of one household's seven children, Barkly East district (the entries also vary the mother's forenames) South Africa · the Booyzen family archive
  • Kolber this page
    what it rests on
    • written in the baptism entries of one household's seven children, Barkly East district (the entries also vary the mother's forenames) South Africa · the Booyzen family archive

What Wikidata says this name is

Copied from Wikidata, not worked out here. It is crowd-sourced and wrong in places, which is why the item is linked below rather than the claim simply repeated.

  • German the language of the name

    Which is not where a family is from. A Polish surname can be borne by people whose forebears never saw Poland, and often is.

Q106118880 on Wikidata ↗ — the item every line above came from.

On the map

  • A country that counted the name
  • Attested by a register, not counted

Where it is borne, and where a record names it. 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 dashed ring is attested by a register but not counted — Denmark publishes which surnames exist and not how many carry each. Sizing those by a number nobody published would invent it. Blank is not absence. This draws the 3 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.

Where it came from

No place of this name is in the gazetteer, so this map says nothing about where the name came from. Search a surname anywhere else and you will be told an origin — that it is Latin, or Italian, or means «joyful». That is etymology, it is usually unsourced, and it is a different question from the one answered here.

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.

Poland

788 Borne — a state counted them — Nazwiska występujące w rejestrze PESEL (z uwzględnieniem osób zmarłych).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Kolber in Poland, so it cannot narrow Poland's 15,758 volumes by date — see Poland's own page for all of it.

United States of America

502 Borne — a state counted them — Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census; Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2000 Census.

Whose archive to write to

55,869 of 688,143 volumes held for United States of America overlap the 1930s and 1960s — the decades Kolber is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Kolber. The commonest kinds: Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration, Censuses and population lists. See everything this atlas holds for United States of America →

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 Kolber in Denmark, so it cannot narrow Denmark's 23,346 volumes by date — see Denmark's own page for all of it.

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.

Poland
United States of America
Denmark

Find Kolber on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable