It’s back to the top 20 Cornish surnames. Michael was a first name drawn from the Hebrew language and the Bible. But its vernacular form in the early 1500s was Michell, also spelt Mychell. Or, put another way, the learned form of the name Michell was Michael.
When Michell also became a surname it was heavily oriented towards the west and absent from large chunks of east Cornwall. The industrialisation and partial urbanisation of the west then reinforced this pattern so that both Mitchell and Michell became predominantly west Cornwall family names.
By 1641 some Mitchell spellings had begun to appear in the east and at Penzance at the other end of Cornwall. A hundred years later they were in the majority and by the 1950s dominant. Nonetheless, the older Michell spelling still clung on unlike other places where it had almost completely disappeared.
| 1520s/40s | 1641 | 1730-80 | 1861 | 1950s | |
| Michell/Michel | 100% | 96% | 45% | 41% | 11% |
| Mitchell/Mitchel | 0% | 4% | 55% | 59% | 89% |
The changing spelling of the surname over 400 years
Cornish studies resources 
I’m rather enjoying the suspense and reading each wonderful post but I’m beginning to lose hope as you near the end of the countdown for Hollow/Holla, Sando/Sandow and Wallis — my three close family surnames.
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Keep looking in, but don’t put too much money on their appearance. I was toying with the idea of doing a post sometime on the -ow, -a ending surnames, a distinctively Cornish aspect of surname history.
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