Starnes
A surname probably linked to the starling bird or to the surname Sterne, with some early references treating it as a regional name.
The #2,507 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 21,378 Americans shares it.
Etymology
The historical sources point to more than one possible source. One line of explanation treats Starnes as a variant of Sterne, a surname connected with the bird-name "starling" or "stern" in older English forms. Another suggestion in the scholarship is that it may reflect an Old English bird word for a starling, though the exact form is not securely established in these excerpts. Because the evidence is brief and somewhat speculative, the name is best treated as uncertain rather than definitively assigned to one root.
History
The name appears in English surname collections alongside forms such as Sterne and Starne, suggesting a medieval or early modern English surname with spelling variation. It is now relatively uncommon but clearly established in the United States, where it survives as a modestly frequent surname. The available excerpts do not give a firm place-name trail or a single well-attested family line, so its early history remains somewhat obscure.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
One 19th-century source explicitly glosses STARNES as "the same as Sterne," showing how fluid surname spellings could be in older records.
From the historical record
“H.R, Starlyng, Sterlyng. STARNE. STARNES. The same as Sterne. START. A place In Devonshire.”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom