by Margaret Makafee (Gretchen Beck)
These names were gathered from Records of the Earldom of Orkney, 1299-1614 (J. Storer Clouston, editor, Scottish History Society, publisher, 1914). This is a collection of a variety of land records, including deeds, bills of sale, records of gifts, and inheritances. Each record typically gives the name of the land owner, and often the names of his/her mother and father, and any brothers and sisters who may hold interest or inheritance rights to the land in question. If a married woman is the land holder, then her husband’s name is usually included.
The records are in three forms: direct transcriptions, abstracts, and translations from Norwegian or Latin. I have not included names from translations since, in these cases, there is no indication of how the name is recorded in the original document. While I am uncertain that all names in the abstracts are unaltered, enough of the forms here are comparable to the forms in the direct transcriptions that I have included them here. (Note: IS it worth marking which namescame from the abstracts?)
I have only sorted the names alphabetically. Different forms of the same name are listed with the form closest to the modern form first, and alphabetically after that. Because of the time spanned by these documents, and because the nature of the documents themselves, an analysis of name frequency is not useful here. Each spelling is followed by a list of dates and the number of the records in which it occurs.
A list of surnames and a full name index is in the works.
Masculine Given Names This page last updated March 19, 2001.