Clans of Fife
The Kingdom, St Andrews, Falkland, the East Neuk.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Fife
- 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.
- ClarkThe clerk, the literate man, when literacy was a profession.
- WalkerThe cloth-fuller, the foot trade that thickened the medieval weave.
- Clan PatersonSon of Patrick, the Lowland patronymic of Scotland.
Historic ties to Fife
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Fife.
- 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.
- Alexander LeslieThe Fife soldier of obscure birth who rose to field marshal under Gustavus Adolphus, brought the Swedish art of war home to Scotland, and held joint command of the army that won the largest battle of the Civil War at Marston Moor.
- John ForbesThe ailing Fife brigadier who cut a road across the Pennsylvania wilderness, took the forks of the Ohio from the French by patience rather than slaughter, and gave Pittsburgh its name.
- 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.
- George BuchananThe Killearn-born Renaissance Latinist whose European reputation as the leading Latin poet of his generation, whose seven-year tutorship of the boy King James VI, and whose 1579 De Jure Regni apud Scotos founded the constitutional theory of the limited monarchy.
- 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.
Stories told here
Legends set in Fife, from any family that carries them.