Dialectal or phonetic variant of Anna/Hannah, from Hebrew meaning grace or favor.
Anner is one of those names that lived most fully in the oral and handwritten records of nineteenth-century America, where phonetic spelling and regional dialect conspired to produce a remarkable variety of given names that resist clean etymological tidying. It is most plausibly an archaic or dialectal variant of Anna or Anne, both derived from the Hebrew *Hannah* (חַנָּה), meaning "grace" or "favor" — one of the oldest and most consistently used women's names in the Western tradition. In communities where names were spoken before they were written, the addition of the final *-r* to create Anner was a natural phonological drift, especially in Southern Appalachian and rural Southern dialects where syllables often acquired a soft trailing resonance.
Ann and Anna have been among the most persistently popular women's names in English for nearly a millennium, appearing in virtually every European Christian naming tradition through their shared biblical root. Hannah herself was the mother of the prophet Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, and her prayer of thanksgiving is one of the great lyrical passages of scripture, giving the name family a literary and spiritual foundation of real depth. Anner inherits all of that while carrying the additional interest of being a regional variant that reveals something about how names actually lived and traveled through communities.
Rare enough to be practically unique today, Anner is the kind of name that rewards research — appearing in census records and family bibles as a reminder that names were once more fluid, more spoken than written, more local than global. It would appeal to families with deep roots in particular regions who want a name that honors their ancestry honestly.