Greetings, all. Another interesting thread! Here's my contribution. Some years ago a Stephens friend pointed out that Stephens, Roberts, Richards, etc are all cornish forms, whereas Stephenson, Robertson, Richardson etc are english forms. This fits my knowledge of anglo-saxon and the history of the english language: "son" is a danish ending (as opposed to "ing", an anglo-saxon ending) and tends to indicate ancestral origins within the Danelaw. Cornwall was well outside the Danelaw and even if the people had spoken a form of english they wouldn't have been affected by that. Subsequent research has alerted me to a cornish habit of using given names, both female and male, as surnames - without even a terminal S. (Ignore Cliff Richard - he was born Harry Webb.) In all cases the given name is the basis of the surname, not vice versa. But with society the way it was, how did female names get to be surnames? A man would be differentiated from other men of the same given name by his father's name (or his occupation etc, but just focusing here on given/surnames), and his wife and daughters just got lumped in with him. My guess is that a man surnamed Betty or Pheby was born out of wedlock - a guess based simply on common sense and social history, plus a remembered story of a man born out of wedlock in Russia whose surname was in the feminine form: not his mother's first name but her actual surname, feminised as she would herself have used it. And when looking particularly at Roberts I realised that Robert is neither a cornish nor an english name: it's french. Most or all the surnames in Cornwall based on men's given names seem to be french, though a mixture of norman and parisian forms. Why? Did the ancestors of all these families cross to Cornwall with (or follow) the Conqueror? Did some of them originate in Paris, not Normandy? William handed big chunks of Cornwall to his supporters, but I don't know that these were necessarily all born in Normandy. Any takers on these questions? Bev Edmonds' message was very useful to me personally re Annis - I'd never thought of a silent G, but it makes sense. Ralph is correctly pronounced "Rafe", as in Ralph Vauhan Williams (good cornish surname there, though in his case welsh) or as in calf, half, palm, calm or - best of all - golf; we just get it wrong. (Rock Hudson in, I think, "Giant", refers to a cow's baby as a "cal-f".) Thanks, Bev. Phoebe