What's in a name

By Robert Macphail

We often hear people say, "That's an odd way to spell Macphail", and don't we always say, "Well that's the way my name has always been spelt", but does it really matter how it's spelt.

If we start at the beginning, in the Highlands people took their Fathers first name and preceded it by Mac (son of); this was popular in the 16th century. Woman would keep their maiden names after marriage and daughters would even take their Mothers maiden name, no wonder we find it so difficult to trace them all these years later.

Originally, the name was spelt MacPhail (the son of Paul), but just as old is the spelling MacFall, but both supposedly mean the same.

The first known record of the name seams to be 1414 in Inverness, but it is probably a lot older than that it just hasn't survived on paper or was never written in the first place.

The comes the most important issue, the fact that up until 1900 most people could not read or write, so a name was recorded as it sounded or as the Author thought it was spelt.

Putting all this together it is not surprising that there are about 70 different ways of spelling MacPhail.

Originally the name would have had a capital "P" in it, to show that it is a name, i.e. Son of Paul, but it doesn't really matter these days, as the name has become a complete word.

So does it really matter how we spell our name, well, to the turn of the Century it probably didn't, but in these literate bureaucratic days of the late 20th Century it does, because it identifies us from other MacPhails in other close family units. The most important question is "Who was this Paul".

Taken from the Clan Phail Society Journal