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.
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 →