Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph

      Middle names

      Scots rarely used these before the nineteenth century. When the custom spread, Scots sometimes used the names of wealthy patrons or benefactors as middle names, but more normally used existing family forenames and surnames, thereby helping identify the wider ramifications of the family tree. Walter Hooks (1847-1915), pattern-maker of Ardrossan, Ayrshire (see pp. 50-1), for example, called one daughter Mary MacClandish Hooks, the middle name being her mother’s maiden name, and another Sarah Boag Hooks, Sarah Boag having been the full name of his father’s third wife.

      Those names were usually bestowed informally: when men appear in records such as tax lists or ships’ manifests with a middle name, this will often be the father’s forename, put there to tell different people apart. John Donald MacDonald and John Neil MacDonald probably weren’t baptized with their middle names – they were just the sons of Donald MacDonald and Neil MacDonald respectively.

      Naming patterns

      Scots families often followed strict rules about naming children. The usual pattern was as shown on this chart:

       Naming patterns. The arrows indicate the person after whom the child was named.

      If this practice was followed strictly, and you know the names of all the children in the family, you can work out what the grandparents’ names would have been. Unfortunately, you will seldom know for sure who the eldest son was, and the system was not followed perfectly: in some families, the eldest son was named after the maternal grandfather, and if a child with a particular family name died, a sibling born later might be given the same one.

      Problems arose when two grandparents had the same name. If both grandfathers were called Roderick, did you name your second son Roderick, as well as the first? Sometimes no, sometimes yes, though in such cases the second Roderick might be given a completely different nickname.

      Naming patterns mean that first names stayed in families, but could migrate down through female lines. Unusual forenames can provide clues to ancestry: the forename Sorley is very rare in Harris, and according to Bill Lawson pretty much everyone with that name is descended one way or another from Sorley MacAulay, one of two MacAulay brothers who settled at Greosabhagh in 1780.

      Surnames

      When you encounter an ancestral surname, look it up in a reliable surname dictionary. Though far from perfect, the best starting-point is G.F. Black’s The Surnames of Scotland, Their Origin, Meaning, and History (New York Public Library, 1946). Some areas have specialist dictionaries, such as G. Lamb’s Orkney Surnames (Paul Harris Publishing, 1978).

      It makes no sense trying to research a family line without seeing if the surname identifies a likely place or origin. You may never be able to trace back all the generations to that place, but at least you will know where the line is likely to have come from. Kinloch or Kinnock, for example, comes from Co. Fife, so a family of that name living in Inverness is likely to have migrated from the south, and any in Glasgow are likely to have moved from the east. Black is good at identifying surnames that can have more than one origin, thus helping you not to make unfounded assumptions.

      Derivations

      Most Scottish surnames, like so many others in the world, are from the following sources:

       From the father (patronymics – see below).

       From the occupation (metonymics), such as Mac an t-Saoir, ‘son of the carpenter’, Anglicized as MacIntyre.

       From nicknames (sobriquets), such as Cameron, from cam shron, ‘crooked nose’, the nickname of a clan chief of unknown origin.

       From places. Some families named from their landholdings have earlier, known ancestry, whilst others come into our ken already identified by their place of residence, and no more, such as:Brodie: from Brodie (Brothac) in Moray (probably Pictish)Colquhoun: from the Barony of Colquhoun, Dumbartonshire, descended from Humphrey de KilpatrickErskine: from the Barony of Erskine, RenfrewForbes: from Forbes, AberdeenInnes: from Innes, Moray, descended from one Berowald in 1160Menzies: from ‘Meyners’, a Lowland surname borne by a family thought to be of Gaelic originUrquhart from Urquhart on the Cromarty Firth.

       An extract from The Origin of Surnames and Some Pedigrees, a two-volume scrapbook deposited at the Society of Genealogists, compiled from entries in The Weekly Scotsman (courtesy of the SoG).

      Patronymics

      ‘Mac’ followed by a personal name means ‘son of x’. This patronymic is the commonest form of Scottish surname. MacLaren, for example, means ‘son of Laren’. There are often traditions associated with the original namesake: Laren was an abbot of Achtow in Balquhidder, and the MacArthur’s original Arthur was said to be King Arthur himself: an unlikely tale! But in many cases, the namesake belongs to one of the genuine, ancient, interconnected pedigrees of the Viking and Dalriadan kings (see pedigrees on pp. 196-7 and 200-1), thus turning a mere surname into the key to a vast amount of early genealogical lore.

      The Gaelic ‘Mac’ is one of a handful of words common to languages worldwide, that may have been part of the original tongue of our earliest human ancestors. It appears, for example, in native American tongues as make (‘son’); in New Guinea as mak (‘child’); and in Tamil as maka (‘child’). When you address someone as ‘Mac’, you’re using a word that, in all probability, your 180,000 x great-grandparents would have understood. M’ and Mc are contractions of Mac, found in both Ireland and Scotland – it is a myth that Scots only used Mc and the Irish Mac: the spellings are completely interchangeable in both countries.

      People might use one or more patronymic. If Angus’s father Donald was the son of Ewan, then he became Angus Mac Donald Mac Ewan. In proper Gaelic, the second and subsequent ‘Mac’s are in the genitive case, so are spelled ‘Mhic’ and pronounced ‘Vic’, and are sometimes transliterated thus too. So, you may find Angus mac Donald mhic Ewan, or Angus mac Donald vic Ewan, all meaning ‘Angus son of Donald son of Ewan’. Throw in some mishearing and Gaelic renderings of the names, and you may have to spend some time deciphering: a rental from Rodel, Harris in 1690 names Angus Mc Coill vic Ewine, which Bill Lawson translates as ‘Angus MacDhomhnaill mhic Eoghainn’, i.e. Angus son of Donald the son of Ewen.

       A painting by Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Fuessli (1741-1825) of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, a Scottish name that Shakespeare made famous all round the world.

      Sometimes, the system isn’t quite so clear as this, and there are cases where someone’s ‘patronymic’ will actually be the name of the person who brought him up, not his real father: all such cases where a foster-child takes its foster-father’s surname are confusing to genealogists.

      Women had patronymics too: the female form of ‘Mac’ was ‘Nic’ or Ni’n’. Angus’s sister Morag may have been recorded as Morag ni’n Donald nic Ewan.

      At this point you are probably thinking, ‘This is confusing because MacEwan is a surname, but you are saying here that it can also be simply a description of someone’s father or grandfather. So, was Donald Mac Ewan surnamed MacEwan, or simply the son of someone called Ewan?’

      I’m afraid the system didn’t distinguish between the two, mainly because hereditary surnames arose in an entirely informal way in the first place. The MacEwan Clan descends from Ewan of Otter, Co. Argyll, who lived in the