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In my experience, someone "imagined" the meaning and everybody else copied it. For the record, the surname Kelsey is most common the US, England and New Zealand (about 1 in 18,000). In Ireland it is rare (1 in 290,000), so probably brought by English settlers. "Imagined" etymologies began in the 18th C., before there was really any disciplined field. The Grimms in the 19th C. began the first real analysis and codified the first key laws governing how languages change, but even they got specific etymologies wrong, because they lacked the necessary documents. The surname Kelsey appears very near its modern form in the 13th C.. We know by comparison that the second element is "ey", meaning an island, peninsula (near-island), coastal land or anywhere defined by water (in this case a floodplain). Kelsey (now South Kelsey) appears in the 11th C. Domesday book as Colesi, however North Kelsey a few miles away is spelled Nor(t)chelsei (y replaced i as a scribal convention for clarity). The original may have been "Cole's ey", shifted to Chelsei in a process known as leveling (ch indicates a front |c|, before |e|, compared to a "back" |c| before |o|, not modern English ch in church).

This message was edited 11/2/2017, 6:08 AM