I’ve doing a little playing around with the information available at The Surname Profiler Project.
The project describes itself as:
A recent research project based at University College London (UCL) has investigated the distribution of surnames in Great Britain, both current and historic, in order to understand patterns of regional economic development, population movement and cultural identity. This website allows users to search the databases that we have created, and to trace the geography and history of their family names.
Obviously I started by looking into my own surname, and I have been able to determine that there is a slow and inexorable spread of the McLarens across the United Kingdom. Witness these two distribution maps, one from 1881 and one from 1998:
(McLaren distribution 1881)
(McLaren distribution 1998)
It’s not a surprise that the highest concentration is in Perthshire, of course, since that is the “ancestral homeland”:
I find it interesting that the name is spreading outward though–I wonder if that represents just the increased travel in the modern society, or if it’s a function of the uncanny fecundity of the clan.
Man, I wish I could see distribution maps like that for the world. Or at least of Canada and Australia (especially for McLaren Vale).
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