Clans of Edinburgh

Families seated in Edinburgh

• Clan NapierInventors of logarithms and Celtic earls of Lennox.
• SmithThe forge surname, the most common occupational name in Scotland and the world.
• BrownDescriptive, the brown one, third most common surname in Scotland.
• WilsonSon of Will, second most common surname in Scotland, behind Smith.
• ThomsonSon of Thomas, the Lowland Scots form, no 'p', distinguishing it from English Thompson.
• AndersonSon of Andrew, the saint that gave Scotland its flag, and the patronymic that crossed every shire.
• ReidThe red one, descriptive Scots surname, dense in the Lothians and the Borders.
• TaylorThe tailor, Norman-French occupational, Scots and English in parallel.
• ClarkThe clerk, the literate man, when literacy was a profession.
• WalkerThe cloth-fuller, the foot trade that thickened the medieval weave.
• WatsonSon of Wat, the Lowland patronymic that produced both the steam engine and Sherlock Holmes's friend.
• Clan PatersonSon of Patrick, the Lowland patronymic of Scotland.
• Clan KeswickSix generations of stewardship over the British China trade, from Edinburgh to Hong Kong.

Historic ties to Edinburgh

Families with historic but not core ground here.

• Mitchell
• Young
• Clan Burns
• Clan Crawford

Champions made here

Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Edinburgh.

• Sir Walter ScottThe Edinburgh advocate who invented the historical novel, recovered the lost Honours of Scotland for the nation, and cleared a fortune in debt as a point of honour.
• James Clerk MaxwellThe Edinburgh-born physicist whose four equations unified electricity, magnetism and light, and whose photograph of a tartan ribbon in 1861 was the first colour image ever made.
• Compton MackenzieThe Gallipoli intelligence officer who wrote the Oxford novel of his generation, co-founded the modern Scottish national movement, and gave the world Whisky Galore.
• Adam SmithThe Kirkcaldy customs officer's posthumous son who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations and founded modern political economy.
• Sir John SinclairThe Caithness baronet who invented the modern social survey and produced The Statistical Account of Scotland, the first comprehensive description of a country by its own inhabitants.
• Andrew CunninghamThe Mediterranean Fleet admiral whose night action at Cape Matapan and dogged evacuation of Crete saved the Mediterranean for the Royal Navy in 1941.
• William RobertsonThe Old Greyfriars minister who led the University of Edinburgh through the high Scottish Enlightenment and wrote the histories that taught Europe how to write narrative history.
• Alexander Graham BellThe Edinburgh teacher of the deaf who gave the world the telephone.
• Thomas YoungThe Milverton Quaker prodigy who read fluent Greek at six and fourteen languages by fourteen, established the wave nature of light with the double-slit experiment in 1801, made the first decipherment of Egyptian demotic, and devised what is now called Young's modulus.
• Henry, Lord CockburnThe Edinburgh judge who was the leading Whig advocate at the Scottish bar through a long Tory generation, drafted the Scottish Reform Act, and wrote Memorials of His Time, the foundational personal record of late-Georgian and early-Victorian Edinburgh.
• Randall DavidsonThe Edinburgh timber-merchant's son who was chaplain to Archbishops Tait and Benson, Bishop of Rochester and of Winchester, and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 to 1928, the longest-serving Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation.
• William BoydThe Accra-born son of Scottish parents who took a double first at Glasgow and Oxford, won the Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa, and across forty years and seventeen novels became the contemporary English-language novelist of the post-imperial twentieth-century lived life.
• Lee AndersonThe Nottinghamshire coal miner who rose from the colliery to the House of Commons, served as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, and became the first elected Member of Parliament for Reform UK.
• Robert BrownThe Montrose minister's son who sailed as naturalist on the Investigator to chart the coasts of Australia, named the cell nucleus, and observed the random motion of pollen grains in water that today bears his name.
• Robert Watson-WattThe Brechin engineer descended in the male line from James Watt, who in February 1935 tracked an RAF bomber by reflected radio waves over Daventry, and went on to build the Chain Home radar that won the Battle of Britain.
• William KeswickThe Edinburgh great-nephew of William Jardine who in 1859 opened the Yokohama branch of Jardine Matheson and began the unbroken six-generation Keswick chairmanship of the largest British trading house in East Asia.
• Mary, Queen of ScotsThe infant Queen of Scots who became Queen of France at sixteen, returned to rule her own realm at eighteen, and through her grandson James the Sixth and First united the crowns of Scotland and England.
• Bonnie Prince CharlieThe Stuart prince who landed in Moidart in July 1745 with seven men and within ten weeks had taken Edinburgh, beaten a government army at Prestonpans, and marched a Highland army to within a hundred and twenty-seven miles of London.
• Sir Arthur Conan DoyleThe Edinburgh-born Irish-Catholic ship's surgeon whose Sherlock Holmes stories set the template for every detective in the English-language popular imagination and made the Holmes name the single most-portrayed character in screen history.
• James ConnollyThe Edinburgh-born Irish socialist organiser who founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896, built with James Larkin the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union into the central institution of Irish labour, and as Commandant of the Dublin Brigade led the working-class regiments of the 1916 Easter Rising.
• Tam Dalyell of the BinnsThe West Lothian Labour MP and 11th Baronet of the Binns whose forty-three-year backbench parliamentary career, his framing of the constitutional West Lothian Question in 1977, and his Father of the House precedence from 2001 made him the conscience of the Commons across the late twentieth century.
• Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of MintoThe Edinburgh-born Borders Whig who as Viceroy of Corsica (1794 to 1796) governed the only British constitutional kingdom in the Mediterranean, and as Governor-General of India (1807 to 1813) opened the British relationship with the Punjab and won the Mauritius and Java campaigns.
• Andrew Fletcher of SaltounThe East Lothian laird whose 1703 Speeches in the Scots Parliament against the proposed Union with England framed the foundational arguments of Scottish constitutional independence, and whose Account of a Conversation introduced into political philosophy the line that the maker of a nation's songs has more power than the maker of its laws.
• Alexander HendersonThe Fife minister who drafted the National Covenant of 1638, served three times as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, and as the leading Scottish commissioner at the Westminster Assembly of 1643 to 1646 set the constitutional foundations of British Presbyterianism.
• Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron ErskineThe Edinburgh-born advocate whose defences of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and the leaders of the London Corresponding Society at the Treason Trials of 1794 secured the modern English law of seditious libel, and whose 1806 to 1807 tenure as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain crowned the legal career of the foremost defender of political and religious liberty of his age.
• Tom JohnstonThe Kirkintilloch journalist and Labour MP whose tenure as Secretary of State for Scotland in the wartime coalition government of 1941 to 1945 founded the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, the largest single piece of mid-twentieth-century Scottish industrial-developmental legislation, and transformed the Highland economy.
• Sir James Young SimpsonThe Bathgate baker's son who at twenty-eight was elected Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh, and who on the evening of the fourth of November 1847 in the dining room of his Queen Street house demonstrated to two assisting physicians that chloroform vapour produced surgical anaesthesia, the foundational discovery of modern anaesthetic medicine.