Peoples, Polities & Lineages

A public reference to the clans, kingdoms and peoples of Britain and Ireland — built to one rule: every claim is sourced, and certainty is stated, never implied. Surnames are medieval, not ancient; a name is not a lineage; tradition is labelled as tradition.

Edwin Landseer's 1851 painting 'The Monarch of the Glen': a red-deer stag against misty Highland mountains. — Edwin Landseer, The Monarch of the Glen (1851) — the Victorian Romantic vision of the Highlands. The age that painted this also invented much of what is now sold as ancient clan tradition: the district tartans, the pageantry, the tidy pedigrees. Edwin Landseer, 1851 · Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Your surname

What does your Scottish surname actually mean? → — the honest version: its meaning and origin, its clan and homeland, and how common it is in America today, every claim sourced — and a plain refusal of the myth the kilt-shops sell, that a shared surname is a shared bloodline.

Peoples & periods

Peoples of Iron Age Britain & Ireland — the ~50 tribes recorded by Ptolemy, with their attested Greek and Latin names

DNA & ancestry

What DNA tests can and can’t tell you — the three test types, the haplogroup tree, and how ancient DNA links to peoples, cultures, places and time (with our own analysis of the British record)

Diaspora & migration

The transatlantic arc — tracing a family from the American census, across the ocean on a passenger manifest, to the parish registers of the old country
Scottish clan surnames in America — how many Americans bear each clan surname today (2010 Census), and why a common name is naming history, not descent
The first settlers of New England — our own analysis of Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary (1860–62): the largest families, the ships, and the English towns they came from
The crossing — who left England 1600–1700, from Hotten’s Original Lists: where the ships were bound, how young the emigrants were, and when they sailed
The old country — where the German and Central-European emigrants came from (Bremen, 1830–1939): origin regions, destinations, and the decades the record forgot
Locating the old country — the emigrants’ home towns resolved and mapped with the GeoNames gazetteer, and the towns (Breslau, Danzig) whose country has since changed
The open archive — Estonia — a genuinely open national archive (11M CC0 records), its genealogical depth, and how the barrier there moves from licensing to transcription
The open name index — Netherlands — the thing everyone else gates: a CC0, person-level genealogical name index of ~370M person-mentions, and the commonest names in it
The people on the boat — the person-level side of the emigration: 735,000 named people, and the families reconstructed because they sailed the same ship, the same day, from the same town

Records

Surnames of the 1696 Aberdeen Poll Tax — the commonest surnames among all taxable people in a Scottish shire, from a public-domain record, and which clan names appear

Scottish clans

Browse the complete index of 281 Scottish clans & families →

Full research pages so far: