In recent months the Society has been contacted by several
interested people, whose surnames do not appear on our list of
recognised Sept names but could possibly be seen
as variations on a name. In response to this the
Sennachie has, at the request of the Webmaster, penned the
following article.
Review of the following surnames to examine
the possibility that there is a
connection to the Clan
MacThomas:
The first
step was to see if any of these names can be found in use in
Scotland before 1855. This was the year civil
registration commenced in Scotland. Also by then people
were moving around the world a lot easier.
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The
official Scottish organisation that has collected as many as
possible the old parish registers (OPRs) and created indexes
of these records is ScotlandsPeople. The OPRs comprise the
records of births & baptisms, banns & marriages and
deaths & burials kept by individual parishes of the
Established Church (Church of Scotland) before the
introduction of civil registration in 1855. The earliest
record is dated in 1553.
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Searches
were carried out of all the above surnames on the
scotlandspeople web site using the pre 1855 parish registers
indexes. These indexes give a comprehensive
representation of names in use in Scotland over the period
1700 to 1855 and therefore if a name was in use it should
appear as a result of a search. The search revealed
-
*****
Comber
- 2 baptisms and 2 burials
The
rest - no results
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For Comber
one each was in Glasgow and in Edinburgh. As the name Comber
appears in southern England, these could relate to visitors or
emigrants.
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Clearly
this result indicates that not only is there no connection to
the Clan, these names are probably not Scottish unless there
has been a later spelling variation.
Such an
issue is very difficult to research and resolve. We have all
heard stories of emigrants to America, who could not read or
write, arriving with a particular surname and either
immediately being given a slightly different surname by an
official, or later adopting a slightly different
surname. But getting proof may be impossible. So
one may speculate that McComb becoming McComber, or a
variation. However, so could Comber/Cumber become
McComber/McCumber.
No one to
date has given a reasonable argument or presentation of a case
base on proof that this is so in relation to one of these
names. Nor in the history of the Clan has any Clan name
appeared with an "er" at the end.
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All this is
regardless of some sites saying there is a connection to
Scotland for example, for McComber and McCumber, such as the
House of Names and the Tree Maker:
Obviously
they see a need to give a meaning to any name and this seems
an easy way out.
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One could
say that McCumber on occasions may have its origins in the USA
and Canada; i.e. it could be a made up name, perhaps by people
wanting to recognise their links to their
origins.
As another
example, a search of the following site for just McCumber
produces 7389 results. Then within this group a search
for births in Scotland produces three results and none of
those have precise details:
Do the same
for McComber and the results are 1589 and
zero.
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The above
research is based on accessing free web sites, and the
following has been extracted from the paid web site
ancestry.com. This site has many thousands of public
trees that can be viewed after paying a
subscription.
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The
following results for the origin of the earliest ancestor
(16th and 17th centuries) are based on two sample lots of
forty trees:
*****
Comber/Cumber
trees
Scotland
Nil
Ireland
Nil
England
-
Hampshire
1
Kent
4
Shropshire
3
Surrey
5
Sussex
27
McComber/McCumber
Scotland
Nil
Ireland
Nil
England
-
Devon
2
Dorset
13
Yorkshire
1
In
England
2
Unknown
5
Taking one tree in particular,
a William Macomber is said to have been born in Dorchester,
Devon on 25th March 1610, married Priscilla Ursula Thomas on
16th January 1634 in Bridport, Dorset, England and then came
to America and settled in Massachusetts. William and Priscilla
are said to have had 6 boys and 5 girls. One can imagine there
are many descendants of this couple in the US today and there
is the possibility of spelling variations to their
surname.
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Turning now to published books
on surnames, the following standard works on Scottish surnames
make no references to any of the above surnames:
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Scots Kith and Kin,
Highland Tryst Museum, 1989. Surnames of Scotland, George
Black, 1996. Scottish
Surnames, David Dorwood, 2003.
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While one book on English
surnames only refers to Comber and Cumber,
namely:
*****
English Surnames, P H
Reaney & R M Wilson, 1991.
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These results again support the
conclusion that this group of names do not have a connection
to the Clan and possibly not to
Scotland.
Note:(added 2019) - Researchers of these surnames may be interested to read a book entitled Macomber Genealogy by Everett S Stackpole, published in about 1909. Please click here to read an on-line version.
there is a
connection to the Clan
MacThomas: