Ancestory

Surnames of the 1696 Aberdeen Poll Tax

Most historical name lists are of the powerful. This one isn’t: in 1696 a poll tax was levied on every taxable person in the shire of Aberdeen, and the surviving roll — printed in 1844 and now public domain — names ordinary people parish by parish established [aberdeenPollTax1696] . We ran our own surname count over it: 19,343 name-mentions, 3,481 distinct surnames.

The commonest surnames

The pattern is history, not noise: Smith leads because it’s occupational and everywhere; then come Gordon and Forbes — the two great families of Aberdeenshire, in their own heartland — alongside distinctively north-eastern names like Milne, Cruickshank and Sangster.

Which clan names appear

30 of the surnames match a recorded Scottish clan or family. How often each turns up here is a real signal of where that name was rooted — Gordon and Forbes dominate because this is their country:

But read it honestly: a common surname is not a clan membership, and a poll tax lists only taxable people — the poorest are under-counted, and this is one shire in one year. A Gordon in the 1696 Aberdeen roll tells you a name was common in the north-east; it does not prove descent from the chiefly line. That caution is the whole point — see the clan index and what DNA can and can’t tell you.

Sources