Kollenborn in Romanshorn, Switzerland

Question

It seems that my mother's family, Kollenborn, came from Romanshorn, Switzerland, near the German border and the Bodensee/Lake Constance (Konstanz).

I have found Kollenborn to be an extremely rare name - none in the Munich or Berlin phonebooks when I looked, but there were quite a few in the Romanshorn book when I looked (1980, when I was passing through). I did not look in any phone books of Swiss cities such as Bern, Basel, etc.

Does anybody know of any other location where Kollenborns lived, or anything else about them? Danke im voraus.

Answer 1

There are actually no Kollenborns at all now in the online phone books for Switzerland, Germany or Austria. This doesn't mean the name doesn't exist, they may be unlisted, but it's certainly very rare.

Nearly all the Kollenborns online are in the USA. Although you say there were some in Switzerland 30 years ago, I would suspect that the name is a misspelling (or they've simply died out back "home").

I'd look at whether it could be Kellenberg / Kellenberger, a Swiss-German name. More than 10% of the nearly 1000 listings for the name are from the canton of Thurgau (which includes Romanshorn), that canton has only 3% of the population of Switzerland. So it's over three times more common there than elsewhere in Switzerland (and the vowels could change with handwriting or accents).