Clan Burns

also Burness, Burnes

By the burn, the small-stream surname the poet made into Scotland's own.

Origin: Ayrshire & Galloway, Scotland
Famous bearer: Robert Burns (1759 to 1796), Scotland's national poet (Auld Lang Syne, Tam o' Shanter, A Red, Red Rose)
Register: Scottish clan

Territory of Burns

CoreHistoric reach

The seat of Clan Burns

Seat vacant

Chief

No one leads the Clan Burns community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.

Current mission

No shared goal set yet. Once Clan Burns has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.

The Burns clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.

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What does the Burns name mean?

Locative, from the Old English burna and the Scots burn, a small running stream. The Burns family of Robert Burns the poet was originally spelled Burness or Burnes; the elder Burns line in Kincardineshire used the longer form until Robert's father William Burness moved south to Ayrshire in the 1750s. Robert dropped the genitive 's' in 1786 around the Kilmarnock edition of his poems, fixing the standard modern spelling of the surname to Burns. The Lowland Scots Burns is densest in Ayrshire and the south-west, where every parish carried at least one small Burns tenant-farming family.

The history of Clan Burns

Burns is among the more characteristic Lowland Scots surnames of the south-west, densest in Ayrshire and the adjoining Lanarkshire and Borders counties. The locative is straightforward: every glen and brae of the Lowland Scots country had its burn, and the families who farmed beside one took the name. The longer Burness and Burnes spellings survived in the older Kincardineshire records of the north-east into the eighteenth century; the modern shortened Burns is the standard form across the Scottish census from the early nineteenth century onwards.

Robert Burns (1759 to 1796), the Alloway-born Ayrshire tenant-farmer's son who in his thirty-seven years on earth produced the body of Scots-language verse and song-collecting that became the central single literary inheritance of modern Scotland, is the founder bearer of the modern Burns name in its world meaning. His 1786 Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect made him the national poet within months of publication; his 1788 work at Ellisland Farm in Dumfriesshire produced Auld Lang Syne and Tam o' Shanter; his 1787-to-1796 collecting and editing for James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Scottish Airs preserved the corpus of Scottish folk song that the modern world inherits.

The Burns family genealogy has been continuously studied since his death; the direct Burns descendants live to the present in the United States, Canada and Australia on the strength of the late-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century Burns family emigration. The Burns Night supper of the twenty-fifth of January (his birthday) has been a continuous Scottish-and-diaspora cultural institution since 1801, when the first Burns supper was held at the cottage at Alloway by nine of his Ayrshire friends. The Burns Federation, founded at Kilmarnock in 1885, today coordinates over three hundred Burns Clubs across the world; the Auld Lang Syne tradition (his 1788 adaptation of an older Scots song) has been the Anglophone New Year's Eve anthem since the 1929 Guy Lombardo BBC-and-American-radio broadcast tradition that took it across the world.

Notable bearers of the Burns name

Robert Burns (1759 to 1796), Scotland's national poet (Auld Lang Syne, Tam o' Shanter, A Red, Red Rose)
Gilbert Burns (1760 to 1827), the poet's younger brother, Ayrshire and East Lothian farmer
George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum, 1896 to 1996), American actor; the surname was not the family's birth-name but an adopted stage name from the American vaudeville tradition

Stories of Clan Burns

Burns and the Kilmarnock edition
1786
On the morning of Monday the thirty-first of July 1786, at the small printing-shop of John Wilson in the Star Inn Close at Kilmarnock in central Ayrshire, the twenty-seven-year-old Alloway-born tenant-farmer and would-be Jamaican-emigrant Robert Burns took delivery of the first printed copies of his small octavo volume Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the publication universally remembered ever since as the Kilmarnock edition. The print-run was six hundred and twelve copies on the standard Scots-printer subscriber-and-retail arrangement at the three-shillings cover-price; the subscription-list had been collected by Burns across the previous five months from the Ayrshire-and-Kilmarnock literary-and-Masonic network on the strength of the manuscript-circulation of the Burns Mossgiel-farm verse. The Kilmarnock edition contained forty-five poems and songs including The Twa Dogs, To a Mouse, To a Mountain Daisy, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, Hallowe'en, and the satirical-and-religious verse-corpus of his Mossgiel-farm years 1783-86. The edition sold out the entire six-hundred-and-twelve-copy print-run within five weeks of the publication, brought Burns the substantial sum of twenty pounds in the first month, established the Burns Ayrshire-tenant-farmer reputation as the national-Scots literary voice of his generation, and persuaded him to abandon the planned Jamaican-emigration arrangement (the Burns-Hamilton-Greenock booking on the Bell brig Nancy for the Port-Antonio Jamaican passage, departing the eleventh of September 1786, that he had been committed to since the April 1786 emigration-decision under the Mossgiel-farm-failure-and-Mauchline-illegitimate-child-disgrace personal-crisis of the spring) and to take up the Edinburgh-literary-and-publishing engagement of November 1786 instead.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Burns mean?

Where does the Burns family come from?

The Burns family is rooted in Ayrshire & Galloway, in Scotland. Within that, the name was particularly concentrated in Carrick and Kyle. The atlas page for the name records the historical territory it has held over the centuries.

Where did the Burns family historically hold territory?

At its greatest historical extent, the Burns name has been concentrated in Edinburgh, Lanarkshire, The Borders and Aberdeen. The atlas page distinguishes the core territory of the name from this wider historical reach with hatched silhouettes on the map.

Is Burns a Scotland surname?

Yes, Burns is a Scotland surname. Its editorial home in this atlas is Scotland, where the historical territory and family record of the name are concentrated.

How old is the Burns surname?

Burns is among the more characteristic Lowland Scots surnames of the south-west, densest in Ayrshire and the adjoining Lanarkshire and Borders counties. European hereditary surnames crystallised broadly between the 12th and 14th centuries, and the Burns name took its modern form within that long settlement.

What is the Burns family known for?

By the burn, the small-stream surname the poet made into Scotland's own. Burns is among the more characteristic Lowland Scots surnames of the south-west, densest in Ayrshire and the adjoining Lanarkshire and Borders counties.

Who is the most famous Burns?

The best-known bearer of the Burns name is Robert Burns (1759 to 1796), Scotland's national poet (Auld Lang Syne, Tam o' Shanter, A Red, Red Rose). Other prominent figures of the family include Gilbert Burns (1760 to 1827), the poet's younger brother, Ayrshire and East Lothian farmer and George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum, 1896 to 1996), American actor; the surname was not the family's birth-name but an adopted stage name from the American vaudeville tradition.

Who are some famous Burnses?

Notable bearers of the Burns name include Robert Burns (1759 to 1796), Scotland's national poet (Auld Lang Syne, Tam o' Shanter, A Red, Red Rose), Gilbert Burns (1760 to 1827), the poet's younger brother, Ayrshire and East Lothian farmer and George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum, 1896 to 1996), American actor; the surname was not the family's birth-name but an adopted stage name from the American vaudeville tradition. Each is profiled on the family page, with cross-links to the geography, stories, and historical events tied to their life.

What stories are told about the Burns family?

The Burns family is associated with Burns and the Kilmarnock edition. Each story has its own page on this site with the full account, the date, the location, and the other families involved.

What is the story of Burns and the Kilmarnock edition?

On the morning of Monday the thirty-first of July 1786, at the small printing-shop of John Wilson in the Star Inn Close at Kilmarnock in central Ayrshire, the twenty-seven-year-old Alloway-born tenant-farmer and would-be Jamaican-emigrant Robert Burns took delivery of the first printed copies of his small octavo volume Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the publication universally remembered ever since as the Kilmarnock edition. The print-run was six hundred and twelve copies on the standard Scots-printer subscriber-and-retail arrangement at the three-shillings cover-price; the subscription-list had been collected by Burns across the previous five months from the Ayrshire-and-Kilmarnock literary-and-Masonic network on the strength of the manuscript-circulation of the Burns Mossgiel-farm verse. The event is dated to 1786.

Is Burness the same family as Burns?

Yes. Burness is a historical spelling variant of the Burns name. The two share the same lineage and family affiliation; different parishes, clerks and migration registrars recorded the same name in slightly different forms, and the variant spellings sit on the same family tree.

Is Burnes the same family as Burns?

Yes. Burnes is a historical spelling variant of the Burns name. The two share the same lineage and family affiliation; different parishes, clerks and migration registrars recorded the same name in slightly different forms, and the variant spellings sit on the same family tree.

Where is the Burns surname found today?

Scotland is the primary historical home of the Burns surname. In the modern era, the name is also borne across the wider diaspora, particularly in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where families carry the line of descent from the same Scotland origin recorded on this page.

What does the Clan Rising page for the Burns family cover?

The Clan Rising page for the Burns family covers the meaning of the surname, the historical geography of the name, famous bearers of the name, traditional stories and the seat of the head of the family. Each section is linked to the underlying atlas of Scotland so the name can be read in the geography that shaped it.

Who is the head of the Burns family today?

The seat for the head of the Burns family is currently vacant on this register. Clan Rising is rebuilding the chief and family structure for the modern era, and the family page allows readers to claim the seat or pledge to the name.