Born in North Carolina, he received nearly all his early legal training through home study and correspondence school.
An obituary from the Duplin Times (Warsaw, North Carolina) said that his father was Henry Robert Kornegay, a Baptist minister, Clerk of the Superior Court, and a lawyer.
[2][a] Kornegay did relate that his father had fought for the Confederate Army as a private in the Civil War.
[1] Kornegay said that he attended the local schools (presumably in Duplin County) and entered Wake Forest College in North Carolina when he was fifteen.
The biography by Martin skips over most of his life thereafter, except to report that he engaged in private practice of law in Vinita and that he was a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, and that Governor William H. Murray had appointed him to serve on the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1931 and 1932.