The UK census of 1841 includes 1175 people with the Cannell surname. Of these the majority (624) were living in the Isle of Man, meaning that about one in every 77 Manx individuals was a Cannell. By comparison Cannells made up a tiny proportion of the population of the rest of the United Kingdom (about 1 in 30000). The name was more prevalent in several English regions: Norfolk, Lancashire and Middlesex. By 1900 the Cannell surname had spread more widely. There were over 2000 people with this surname in the UK (of which the Manx now made up only a third) and over a thousand in the US.

Analysis of the Manx records show that Cannell has been a common name on the Isle of Man (particularly in the parish of Kirk Michael) throughout recorded history, and that multiple Cannell families were living there in the 1490s. (The earliest records actually give the surname as Mc Dannell, but its evolution to Cannell can be traced through the land records. Almost all Manx male names had the Mc prefix at this time.) There are no earlier Manx records with which we can go further back in time.

A search of online records reveals a handful of early 16th century Cannells on the British mainland, including three wills from Norfolk. These could be from the same family, from a separate derivation of the same surname, or simply mis-transcriptions of another surname. The only way to discover this is through Y-DNA testing.