Standardised Spelling

When I tell people I spelled my own name wrong for 13 years they usually look at me like I'm a little bit crazy, but in reality it is the perfect example of the nature of Scottish names changing over time and it all started with my grandad.

My grandfather was orphaned at 2 years old, along with his older brother, when his mum passed away of tuberculosis. After a stay in an orphanage he was then fostered in the Outer Hebrides on South Uist, where he and his brother worked on their foster parents farm. When he was old enough he left Uist and joined the army, training at Fort George before serving in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and serving under Mad Mitch in Aden. During this period he always spelled his surname MacKechnie. He knew this was his name and had always heard that the Scottish spelling was 'Mac' and the Irish was 'McK'. Without his parents there to correct him he assumed, as he was Scottish, it must therefore be spelled MacKechnie, right?

He was in fact proved wrong. When my grandad left the army and joined the ministry of defence he finally got hold of his birth certificate for the first time and discovered that he had in fact been living a lie... he was a McKechnie! It came as a little bit of a shock to the system. Did this mean he was Irish? What did this mean for his wife, 4 daughters and granddaughter who were all now MacKechnie's? He was relieved to discover that he wasn't actually Irish but had simply fallen for a popular myth. As David Dorward, author of Scottish Surnames would later tell us “The form ‘Mc’ is simply a printer’s contraction and implies nothing as to the history of the name or the genealogy of its bearer.”

When researching my family tree with my grandad I was heavily dependant on the births/deaths and marriages register for Scotland and I noticed how easy it would be to make this mistake and potentially scroll right past your great, great granny. In Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry, Kathleen Corey wisely wrote, "do not say that you know your family was always ‘Mac’ and not ‘Mc’ or vice versa. You may know now, but the registrar or your ancestor may not have been so positive." This may mean you miss out on finding a whole branch of family by making a simple assumption. Especially if your family have emigrated elsewhere, it's not unknown for the ships captain to take down the names of those who made the voyage to new lands incorrectly. We discovered that I actually have a great aunt who now lives in California! This doesn't just apply to the Mac's and Mck's of the world, but names such as Smith have been changed to Smythe, Brown to Browne and some Thomson's to Thompson and vice versa.

Before the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 most people did not actually have hereditary surnames. When communities were very small most people would go by a forename, descriptor or nickname but as they grew it was necessary to add a surname the sources used for these names were almost endless. So trades, nicknames, places of origin, and fathers' names became fixed surnames - names such as Fletcher and Smith, Redhead, Taylor, Green and Thatcher. By 1400 most English families, and those from Lowland Scotland, had adopted the use of hereditary surnames.

When my grandad made this discovery they went through the process of changing my grandmother's and his daughters names to match his, but somewhere along the line I was missed. Much like my granddad it wasn't until I was 13 and applying for my first passport that I discovered I was secretly a MacKechnie while the rest of my family were now McKechnie's. I haven't changed mine, but it doesn't make me feel any less attached to or a part of my family or clan. It's only a letters difference after all.