the Yendell name is mainly found around the south west of England in the early 1800s Devon-Somerset area,the name itself changes according to who is spelling it.Quite alot of the people in my Family tree could not read or write so they will not have known which was correct, they were Agricultural labourers.I have some Death Certificates which record the name as Yandle and the same person is recorded in the Parish Registers as Yendell also the census records the name as Yundle this all for the same person John Yendell who was born in the late 1700s PS Goggle/The YANDLE COMPLEX this tells you all about the name changes

Contributed by David Yendell on 2009-12-15 05:41:44

Some forty years ago I did a lot of work on this surname. This account is from memory and not from my buried notes. There at least thirty different spellings in the records ranging from Yandal to Yendole. Individuals, before literacy became general with the 1871 Education Act, were referred to by several different spellings within their own area unless that individual was both literate and of enough status locally to ensure some continuity post Dr Johnson's Dictionary when consistent spelling became a sign of civility. The surname is clearly bisyllabic with the stress on the first syllable; the second's tone is much lower, hence the greater variation in spelling of the second syllable. It was also clearly pronounced with a Devon/Somerset drawl. In 1841 the name's range is predominantly Somerset, Devon, Bristol, and west Dorset. By 1600 the name is mainly restricted to southwest Somerset and east central Devon. By 1400, it appears almost exclusively in, from memory, a circle perhaps ten miles in diameter centred on the parishes of Molland and the Ansteys in Devon, through which flow one of the numerous west country rivers named Yeo. From this my deductions are that the surname has a single family origin, which was established in Molland or Anstey in the generation before the name's creation; that the name relates to a dell of the Yeo (it appears to have its source in Lipscomb); that the 'n' in the name is some form of dialect grammatical construction linking the river's Ye and the Dell. Of course, I have no expertise on this so it's best guess. The name doesn't appear in any dictionary I have consulted, but I do have a letter from one of their editors thinking the above theory possible.

Contributed by George Hornby on 2010-02-21 06:10:23