Question

Do you have any proof that Sarah Cornwell and her sister were both named Francis, this seems very odd to me.

Comments

There is nothing odd about a forename recurring in a set of siblings, it frequently happened in the past when perinatal mortality was frequent. Parents usually named their next child in honour of the lost babe; or is your question about the male specific Francis being used instead of the more usual Frances for a girl?

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Having said that, check it out.  These things often result from the internet's habit of combining people.  We have a lot of gedcommed-in middle names that people never had.  Sometimes not easy to get them removed.

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or the name Francis is the mother's maiden name. Either used to keep the maiden name alive or when children are born before marriage then legitimized later.

Answer 1

While it is uncommon for two living siblings to share the exact same name, it does happen. I recently had a couple where the first and last child born had the exact same name, the eldest was married and leaving home about the same time the youngest was born.

In this case however you have siblings with two distinct names "Sarah Frances" and just "Frances" - I see nothing particularly unusual about that. I can think of dozens of families where multiple children share part of a name (or a slightly different form of the same name) with a sibling. For example one family I researched had children named Johannes Catharinus (who died at age 2), a second Johannes Catharinus, a Catharinus Johannes, and also a Johanna Catharina. As an aside, the father was also named Johannes Catharinus, and another sibling was Janna Cornelia which makes records with just initials a real treat. A different family had a Gerardus Wilhelmus, a Johannes Wilhelmus, and a Pieter Gerardus, and yet a different family had Dirk Arie, and Arie Dirk.