Does anyone know the decent of the surnames Cox and Sawula?

Question

I was wondering if anyone knew what decent these names came from. Cox is my father's surname, and Sawula is my mother's maiden name, so I wanted to know if anyone knew where I came from.

Answer 1

this is from ancestry.com

English: from Cocke in any the senses described + the suffix -s denoting ‘son of’ or ‘servant of’.

Irish (Ulster): mistranslation of Mac Con Coille (‘son of Cú Choille’, a personal name meaning ‘hound of the wood’), as if formed with coileach ‘cock’, ‘rooster’.

But to really know your ancestry, you will have to do the research.

Sawula is very rare  the census and could be from Poland or Austria.

Answer 2

The only information I could find about Sawula is that the name is possbly "Mediteranian" !

Surname: Cox

This interesting surname has a number of possible origins. Firstly, it may have originated as a nickname from the bird, the c**k, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "cocc", and applied to a young lad who strutted proudly like a c**k. The nickname may also have referred to a natural leader, or an early riser, or a lusty or aggressive individual. It may also have derived from the Olde English personal names "Cocc" or "Cocca", found in placenames, although not on independent record. But as "c**k" became a common term for a boy, it may also have been used affectionately as a personal name. The third possibility is that it may be of topographical origin for a "dweller by the hill", deriving from the Olde English "cocc" meaning haycock, heap or hillock. In London it probably originated from the sign of a house or inn. One William le c**k, appears in the Staffordshire Forest Pleas (1271) and Hugh ate Cocke, is noted in the Subsidy Rolls of London (1319). In the modern idiom the surname has many variant spellings including c**k, Cocke and c***s. On October 18th 1556, Alicea Cox married Burkrave Westdrop at St. Martin in the Fields, Westminster, London. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Aluuinus Coc, which was dated 1086, in the Domesday Book of Cambridgeshire, during the reign of King William 1, known as "The Conqueror", 1066 - 1086.

Edit : I have found this reference to sawula :  Gothic :

saiwala. Old English : sawula. English : soul. German :

Seele, SAI sai sa so Se, CER (ker kwer kwel wel)

wala wula ul ele.

http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci....

Answer 3

For Cox trying the following link-

http://genealogy.about.com/library/surna...

For Sawula, Ancestry.com do a great paper back book called - The Sawula Name in History

Answer 4

I believe that it's (most recently) a Scottish/Irish last name with some English roots. That's what my grandmother (Anna Cox) always told me.