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The cornish Surname

cornish Name Meaning and History

  1. English: regional name for someone from the county of Cornwall, from Middle English corneys, cornysh. Not surprisingly, the surname is common in adjacent Devon, but it is also well established as far afield as Essex and Lancashire.
  2. Possibly also an Americanized spelling of German Kornisch, a nickname for a sickly or weak person, from Sorbian krne ‘weak’, ‘poor’.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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cornish Family Facts

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Distribution of cornish Families in the US in 1920
Number of cornish families
 101-199
 34-100
 1-33
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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The cornish name in History

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