Does your surname link you to royalty – or does it mark out your ancestors as fools, philanderers – or just plain ugly?

Long before Lorde, Adele, or even Cher, one name was all a person needed. In Britain before the Norman Conquest of 1066, people went by single names. If a village had an overabundance of Toms, one ...

Great Britain is old as sin, and these classic British last names are, too. Since about 1066, you could find these British ...

"What's in a name?" Juliet asked as she and Romeo tried to puzzle their way around the troubling problem of their warring families. Well, plenty, the most detailed investigation into surnames in ...

Track the origins of your surname with these seven last name 'types'... Do you know where your surname comes from? For a lot of you reading this (this writer included) your surname won't actually have ...

Rare surnames are dropping out of national records at an "alarming" rate with some down to just a few hundred, research has shown. While the top 10 surnames in England and Wales have been "relatively" ...

Many of us like to imagine we are distantly related to royalty and that like Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries we will be whisked away to live in a castle. Some celebrities are known to have a ...

Research led by University of Leicester geneticists, comparing the DNA of 150 pairs of men who share British surnames, has shown that about a quarter of pairs are linked genetically. Their findings ...

So according to the Guild of One-Name Studies, an organisation devoted to the study of family names, “traditional English surnames” such as Mackmain, Bythewood, Foothead and Pauncefoot, are dying out.

There is a great deal of interest in a fine-scale population structure in the UK, both as a signature of historical immigration events and because of the effect population structure may have on ...