Introduction

In England, surnames were introduced after the Norman Conquest and were initially adopted by the great landholding families. Other classes followed suit with many families in the South acquiring surnames between 1250-1350 and in the North a century later. Many of these original surnames were lost as a result of the Black Death outbreak in 1348 which killed between one-third and one-half of the population. It is believed that the vast majority of English people had fixed hereditary surnames by the fifteenth century. [i],[ii]

In Lowland Scotland, surnames were introduced in the twelfth century as a result of Norman influence. Uptake by landed families occurred before 1300 but was much slower in the general population, with adoption not widespread until at least the sixteenth century. [iii]

Figure 1: Map Demarcating the Highland and Lowland Regions of Scotland.[iv]

 

The existence of a clan system until the eighteenth century in the Highlands gave rise to surnames arising in a different manner. Here, individuals took the surname of the clan they were associated with and were not necessarily linked by blood. Surnames here did not become fixed and stable until the eighteenth century. [v]

The hereditary nature of surnames meant that they were originally used to study population genetics.[vi] However, with the development of genetic fingerprinting[vii]  came a reversal and it is now possible to use Y-DNA to analyse whether all men with the same surname share a common ancestor, with the assumption that the rarer the name the more likely this is. [viii]

The majority of academic studies in this field have used a small number of markers and have not been related to the documentary genealogical information of individual families. This makes it difficult to extrapolate the results to an individual surname project. Surname projects on the other hand are usually run by volunteer genealogists who do not always write up or publish their findings, making it hard to put the results of different projects into context in comparison with each other.[ix]

This project examines the development of the Brimer and Brymer surnames by asking the following questions:

  1. When and how did the Brimer / Brymer surnames arise within the UK? Do the surnames have a monogenetic origin and can all the families be linked by family reconstitution techniques?
  2. Is it possible to confirm these links by Y-DNA analysis of short tandem repeats and prove or disprove links where the records are inconclusive or missing? What haplotypes are represented and what does this reveal about the ancestry of the families before genealogical records?
  3. What are the variants and deviants of these surnames and what is the time frame in which the names became settled? Are these surnames variants themselves of another surname such as Bremner or Brebner?
  4. How did the Brimer / Brymer family develop from its origins? What are the migration patterns that were followed within the UK and abroad and how has this affected surname distribution? How have factors such as longevity, age at marriage, fecundity and reproductive success affected the families’ development?

It is hoped that the results will contribute to the wider understanding of surnames and their relationship with Y-DNA by enabling comparison with other projects.

 

[i] Kennett, Debbie. (2012) The Surnames Handbook: A Guide to Family Name Research in the 21st Century. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. pp. 23-25.

[ii] Redmonds, George; King, Turi and Hey, David. (2015) Surnames, DNA, & Family History. Revised Paperback Edition.. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 2-4.

[iii] Kennett, Debbie. (2012) The Surnames Handbook: A Guide to Family Name Research in the 21st Century. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. pp. 26-28.

[iv] Rockley, J. Lowland-Highland Divide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Highlands#/media/File:Highlands_lowlands.png : accessed 24 June 2016.

[v] Kennett, Debbie. (2012) The Surnames Handbook: A Guide to Family Name Research in the 21st Century. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. pp. 26-28.

[vi] Lasker, G.W. (1985) Surnames and genetic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[vii] Department of Genetics. Alec Jeffreys and genetic fingerprinting. Leicester: University of Leicester. http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/jeffreys : accessed October 2015.

[viii] Redmonds, George; King, Turi and Hey, David. (2015) Surnames, DNA, & Family History. Revised Paperback Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 173-193.

[ix] Kennett, Debbie. (2012) The Surnames Handbook: A Guide to Family Name Research in the 21st Century. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. pp. 161-165.


Brimer-Brymer database last updated at 2016-07-02 00:29:43 with 4028 census records and 2856 individuals