This branch originated in Fife, a county in the east of Scotland. The earliest reference to the surname dates back to the sixteenth century but its origins in Fife almost certainly stretch much further back. There is no evidence that the Fife Annals are connected to the Annals of Orkney.
The name was particularly ‘unstable’ in the earlier centuries and a wide variety of different spellings occur; Annal, Annall, Annan, Annand etc. and it’s not until the mid-nineteenth century that the main branch of the family (based in St Andrews and across the River Tay in Dundee) settled on the spelling Annal.
Another branch, descended from a man who left Dundee in the 1830s, settled in Ayrshire and commonly used the spelling Annall, while others adopted the variant spelling Annan(d).
The Annals of Yorkshire are all descended from one man; Thomas Annal(l) who left Fife sometime before 1741 and settled in the North Yorkshire parish of Well.
Click on the links to view two trees showing the early generations of the Annalls of Well, Yorkshire:
The Annals of the Annals 