Fairminer - Treneman - Family Tree

Cornwall

At the tip of England a south western peninsular, Cornwall stayed fiercely independent from the rest of Britain for centuries.
Celtic chieftains kept some influence during Roman occupation, and maintained autonomous control of the Kingdom of Cornwall well into Anglo-Saxon times, before it was absorbed as part of Wessex by the 11th century .
Cornish was still spoken, however, particularly in the far west of the county, until the death of Dolly Pentreath, its last fluent native speaker, made it officially extinct in 1777.
A strong sense of regional identity flourished alongside the language, and many maps produced  before the 17th century depicted Cornwall as an annexed nation on a par with Wales or Ireland.
Mass rebellions in 1497 and 1549 pitched the county against its London rulers, and during the Civil War it became a Royalist outpost, cut off from the predominantly Parliamentarian West Country, with Cornish leader Sir Richard Grenville lobbying for semi-independence should the War have swung in the King’s favour.
This irrepressible Cornish spirit endured into the 18th century, with jacobite James Paynter staging another uprising in 1715, that was soon quelled. He was tried for High Treason, but exercised his right to be tried in front of a jury of fellow Cornish ‘tinners’, and was subsequently cleared.

Mines of Resources

Cornwall was long synonymous with the mining industry, once famously providing up to half of the world’s supply of tin and copper, as well as china clay, china stone and arsenic.
Its local expertise was revered around the world, and a School of Mines was established in 1888. However, as the tin reserves became exhausted and fresh deposits were discovered abroad, many Cornishmen emigrated to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where their skills were in demand.

[from - Your Family Tree Spring 2011 issue 101]