Surname Report Title

Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Manx names, and the Norse, Norman and English names that settled among them.

What you get

A PDF of roughly 800–1,200 words covering:

— The Gaelic form of the name and what it means, with the disputed readings where scholars disagree rather than one confident answer — The sept or family it belongs to, and the territory they held — Where the name concentrated by the 1800s, county by county — Every variant spelling worth searching, and why the spellings diverged — Which record sets survive for that name and county, and which were destroyed — Where the walls are, and what would get you past them

What you need to send

The surname, and the county or country if you know it. If you don't, say so — narrowing it is part of the job.

If you have a rough date or a place your family left from, include that. It changes what I can tell you.

Turnaround

Within seven days.

What this is not

This is not a family tree and it's not a DNA interpretation. It's a report on the name — its origins, its geography, and the records that exist for it. It gives you the ground to search from, not the search itself.

Where the evidence is genuinely uncertain, I say so. Most surname sites give you one confident answer; a lot of these names don't have one.

Any surname

My deepest ground is Ireland, Britain and the Isle of Man, including the Norse, Norman and other settler names among them. But send whatever you have. If a name is outside what I can do justice to, I'll tell you before I take your money — not after, and not by padding something out.