This is a project that led to a book on the surnames of Cornwall in 2019.
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Cornwall: history, surnames and society, from Bernard Deacon
This is a project that led to a book on the surnames of Cornwall in 2019.
Cornish studies resources 
I would like to do something similar for surnames and variants in County Durham in the sixteenth century. Would you be willing to help me with the setting up of the mapping?
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Sorry, Ken but I don’t have any templates for Durham. The map in the piece above was drawn from an original parish template, which I altered to reflect C19th registration sub-district boundaries. So your first task is to find a decent large scale parish map template for Durham and then use gimp or other suitable photoshop software to manipulate the image and clean it up if necessary.
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Modern boundaries can be found from online from the OS: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/boundary-line.html? and the free software QGIS can plot those with data dependent styling.
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Very interesting, I look forward to reading more
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Where did the surname Cobbledick originate from prior to Cornwall ? I heard that it might be from Friesland before Cornwall during the medieval times ?
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You don’t want to believe everything you hear. I’ve heard that Cobbledick originated from Lincolnshire but I’m sceptical about that too. If it was either from Lincs or Friesia it must have arrived early as it was already present in the far north of Cornwall by 1500. It’s a bit of a mystery but my theory in my Surnames of Cornwall (p.38), for what it’s worth, is that it’s either from a lost placename in Devon or a nickname.
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Is the robartes robertes name common to cornwall ive come back to a robertes robartes spelling in my geneology and have searched on internet and found multiple robertes in cornwall but the name after was roberts is it still a cornish spelling or something from elsewhere?
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Hi I have tried reaching out before about alternate spellings of roberts in Cornwall are they valid or are they not names are robertes
And robartes But afterwards became roberts please give me some info?
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It’s the same name, just spelling variations
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My name is ”Le Pihiff”. ”Pihiff” in breton. This name is very rare in Brittany. In my family, the legend tells our ancestors came from North. But North of what ? I don’t know! Could Pihiff name be a cornish name or welsh name? Or from another celtic country ?
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hi my family comes from sanscreed cornwall named ladner I have trace back father to son to 1520 ad havent found any before 1520. I would like to know if that’s as far as records go or is there earlier documents, or did my ancestors originally come from germany, ie 13th century ie the ladner von ladenburg with royal hereldry ie crowned eagle (black on gold blazon, and red on silver chrvron)
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Hi Pete, You’ll find it difficult to pursue any family line back before the 1530s, when the registration of vital events began. There are many earlier documents although they’re not easy to search. There are also transcripts of some early documents – I note that there’s no Ladners in Nicholas Orme’s collection of Cornish wills, 1342-1540 or in Padel’s records of the Arundell estate of Lanherne from the 14th to 16th century either for example. That doesn’t surprise me as the name does not appear in the parish registers until around 1600 and then very localised in West Penwith. If you’ve got evidence of the name back to 1520 then you’ve extended it by a couple of generations. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names tells us it’s ‘unexplained’ or possibly a variant of Latner. However, the name Latner does not turn up in 16th century Cornwall so this is unlikely. I prefer my explanation that it was a local variant of the more common name Lander.
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Cancel that last. I’ve just discovered a far more likely explanation for the origin of Ladner. The place name Lannergh in the 14th century was pronounced Lanner by the 16th century, when hereditary surnames were often being adopted in west Cornwall. Musing further I wondered if Ladner was a pre-occluded form of the placename Lanner. (Pre-occlusion changed the sound /n/ to /dn/, e.g. pen to pedn in the Cornish language and was occurring by the 1500s). Sure enough, when checking for the surname Lanner, I find a Robert Lanner born 1566 in Sancreed, the parish where the name Ladner has its origin. Moreover, there were many burials of folk named Lanner in Sancreed in the 1580s and 1590s. I can’t find the placename Lannergh or Lanner anywhere in West Penwith, but it could be a lost placename and there are several examples not far to the east on the Lizard. To sum up, Ladner is a development of Lanner, a locative name with its origin in west Cornwall.
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Hello Bernard, good afternoon.
I would like to know if my surname, Tremearne, appears or is referenced in the book of Cornish surnames.
Thanking you in advance.
Best regards,
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I’m afraid it didn’t make the cut for the book – there were only two households headed by someone called Tremearne in 1861, both in St Ives. However, the history of the name is fairly clear cut. There are two places called Tremern/Tremearne – one at Breage and the other at Madron. It looks as if both gave rise to the surname. The earliest example I can find is John Tremearne in 1524 at Breage (his name was spelt Tremerne in 1545). However, the presence of Tremearnes at Paul by 1600 suggests that the more westerly Tremearn also separately gave rise to the surname. Another line arose at Perranzabuloe after the 1620s but the name was restricted to that parish, Breage and Paul until the late 1600s when it first appears at St Ives. The Perran and Breage lines appear to have failed by the mid-1700s when the name became confined to St Ives and Paul and by 1861 it was just found at St Ives.
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Hello Bernard, Yes, my surname is very uncommon. My great-great-grandfather emigrated from St Ives to the Canary Islands in 1870, where he had his descendants and died in 1900. Currently, only my family has the surname Tremearne, and there are about 30 of us in all of Spain, and only in the Canary Islands. I’ve been searching, and I believe that even today there’s no one left in Cornwall with that surname. I understand it means “farm” or “place of death.” Is that correct? Do you know the reason for that meaning? If you could give me any information, I would be very grateful. Thank you very much.
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Although it looks as if it should contain the element trev (farm, hamlet or settlement), old forms of this name have been suggested to include tnou (an early term for valley). Mern or mearn is an unknown element, possibly a name – thus Mearn’s valley – or a descriptor for the valley. The link to ‘place of death’ is fanciful and not suggested from early spellings. It probably stems from the superficial resemblance with a Middle Cornish word mernans for death.
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