When tracing my fathers surname COLE, I hit a wall with my 3rd gr. grandfather....

Question

When tracing the next branch over.  I was able to go as far back as the 12th century (on our wikitree).  There I picked up the surname COLVILLE (in England).

I've read that COLE is the american spelling for McCOOL(Scottish and Irish) and KOHL(German).  

Does anyone following the COLE surname know if it may have originated from the much earlier spelling COLVILLE?  

Thank you!

Comments

https://forebears.io/surnames/cole

Answer 1

As you have seen, Cole is a name with multiple origins. A goodly share of North American Coles are descended from a source you didn't name, specifically Dutch immigrants to New Netherland who used the surname Kool or Cool (pronounced "Cole") and changed the spelling over time. I believe that some people named Kool/Cole were among the New Netherland descendants who followed the Appalachian Mountains southward during the 1700s, settling in places like West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

See http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Kool_Name_Study and http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Kool_Name_Study

Comments

So far, my Cole's are from Tennessee.  I've reached the point where any official records are rare.

Thanx for the link!

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Yes, your earliest identified Cole ancestor was born before the Civil War, which is a problematic breakpoint for many southern U.S. records. And it doesn't look like WikiTree members have traced many (or any?) male Kool/Cole lines forward in time much past the early 1700s. :-(

Answer 2

Such a hard family line to trace. My Cole line was born in Maine but came to Canada in the 1860's, I can not find anyone with any records that show existence of the family in Maine, not with the names I have anyways. They were known as skedaddlers fleeing from war...I wondered if name changes happened in the process