Guild of One-Name Studies
One-name studies, Genealogy
Study: Sennett
Variants: Sennitt, Sinnett, Sinnott, Synnott
Category: 3 - A study where research using core genealogical datasets and transcriptions is well under way on a global basis.
Website: sennett.one-name.net
DNA website: www.familytreedna.com/public/Sennett
Contact: Ms Corinne Curtis
My one name study started, like many others, with my own personal research into my maternal grandmother's ancestry. She was a SENNETT, born in Normanton, West Yorkshire. My mother remembered visiting her relatives in Normanton as a child, and being aware of the large numbers of relatives in Normanton. I quickly became aware that most of the SENNETTs in Yorkshire appeared to be related and started collecting all references to the surname there. As well as the Yorkshire SENNETTs, I noticed that several other areas of England also had significant numbers of people with the same surname, and I wondered if they would be able to be linked at some point. It also interested me that the family in Yorkshire were miners who had come from Avoca in Co Wicklow, Ireland, and I wondered if they would connect to the much larger group of SINNOTT of County Wexford.
In 2011 I registered the SENNETT one name study and began to more formally collect up further references and reconstruct families starting with English records.
By 2015 I had also made significant progress with North American, Welsh, and Australian records and identified some instances of the name in other countries (New Zealand, South America).
Currently the main focus of the study is on Irish records and, in liaison with other researchers, the early history and origins of the name from its 12th century arrival in Co Wexford.
SINNOTT/SYNNOTT families with Irish ancestry all appear to originate from a first arrival in Co Wexford in the 12th century. A small team of dedicated historical researchers are continuing to seek out and review historical records to piece together lineages and origins and verify (or challenge) previous work.
The Y-DNA (male line) surname study is also becoming interesting with latest BigY test results indicating much earlier Balkan origins.
SENNETTS of Cornwall have now been shown to have genetic links to Irish SINNOTT/SYNNOTT, though a common ancestor has not yet been identified. SENNITTs have been in Cambridgeshire since at least the early 1500's (no DNA testing done yet) and appear to be a completely separate origin. SINNETTs have a long established presence in Wales (particularly Pembrokeshire) but again, no DNA testing has been done to establish whether they share the same origins as the Irish SINNOTTs.
Col David Sinnott - Governer of Wexford (c1649); 'The Synnot Children, 1781' painted by Joseph Wright of Derby. These were Maria, Marcus and Walter, children of Sir Walter Synnot (1742-1821) and his wife Jane of Ballymoyer, Co Armagh;
Mack Sennett (silent movie producer) - originally born Michael Sinnott in 1880 in Canada (of Irish ancestry);
Lieutenant John Sinnott, author of 'A Military Catechism' (Portsmouth 1841);
Colonel Edward Stockley Sinnott (1868-1969), civil engineer;
Maude Arncliffe Sennett (1862-1936) - suffragette and anti-vivisection campaigner;
Sir Richard Sennett (1852-1947) - sheriff of the City of London 1923-34;
Hilary Nicholas Hugh Synnott, CMG (b1945) - diplomat;
brothers Frederick (1830-66) and Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840-1921) who were both journalists; Frederick also carried out extensive surveys of the northern Flinders Ranges, and Sinnett Peak is named after him;
The town of Sennett, New York was named after Daniel Sennett, a prominent citizen and circuit judge.
(please see http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk/surnames/SENNETT/ for up to date data).
Frequency of the SENNETT surname from the above website was about 8 per million people in 1881 in the UK, and about 11 per million in the UK now. In the US, current frequency is about 7 per million, with about 3 per million in Australia. In spite of the Irish origins of most of these, there are very few people in Ireland using this spelling.
Frequency of the SINNOTT/SINNETT surnames appears to be slightly higher than SENNETT, and SYNNOTT slightly lower.
The main study database is a family tree database (Legacy) containing over 70,000 records, most of which are linked into multi-generation trees.
This database (with details of living people hidden) is published in its entirety on the Surname Study Website http://sennett.one-name.net/index.php. This should be considered a "working" database, so if you have information about your own S-NN-T family, corrections, additions and other contributions will be greatly appreciated.
Information has been extracted from a large number of (mostly online) databases and includes: Census; civil and parish birth marriage and death records; cemetery records; newspaper records; immigration documents; military and occupation records, etc.
Data is collected from all geographic regions where the study surname is known to be found.