The Old Country
The Old Country
Type your surname. Get its history as an illustrated report: what the name means, the clan and country behind it, the castles still standing, and how it crossed the ocean. Every claim sourced.
Search your name and you will be sold a “family coat of arms,” a pedigree stretched back to a legendary king, and a scroll set in a font that did not exist before 1985. Very little of it is true. In Scots law there is no such thing as a family coat of arms: arms belong to one living person, and what a family shares is the crest badge.
We built the opposite. Every report is written from parish registers, charters, government orders and the work of modern historians. Where the record is solid, we say what it shows; where a story rests on clan tradition, we say that, in those words, on the page. The honest version of a name's history is better than the invented one.
Thirty to forty pages, set like a book and illustrated with period paintings, engravings and antique maps. Every image is genuine and out of copyright, credited with its artist and date on the page it sits on.
Turn through a real one. These are the actual pages, not a marketing sample: the cover, the contents, the artwork plates and the chapters, exactly as they arrive.
The cover.
For German names, the clan chapter becomes the region chapter: the states of the name, the trades behind it, and the crossing.
Almost everyone wants to know the same thing first: is there a castle? Usually there is. Each report maps the country the name came from and lists its great houses, which you can walk into, which are ruins on a loch, and how to see them in a single day's drive.
Dunvegan on Skye has held the same family for eight hundred years. Kilchurn stands empty at the head of Loch Awe. Castle Tioram sits on a tidal island you can walk to at low water and be stranded on at high. Your name has ground of its own, and the report tells you how to stand on it.
Sixty-six names are written and ready to download this minute, including the three most common surnames in Scotland and two Irish names, one of them a royal one. Each one has a full chapter free to read before you buy. Any other surname is researched and written for you, from the archives, within forty-eight hours of your order.
$14.99 each, on the shelf or written for you. A name not on the shelf is researched and written within 48 hours at the same price.
If a name's record turns out too thin to fill a report honestly, we refund you in full rather than pad it.
German names are next on the shelf. Leave yours and we will email you the day it is written.
One piece of research, three ways to have it. Every edition includes the report itself.
The report
In a minute
$14.99
The full report as a PDF. Every claim carries the source it came from.
Read it tonightThe film
In five days
$39.99 with the report
Five and a half minutes on your name: where it began, the country it came from, what it survived and where it went. Your spelling on the title.
Watch the trailerThe printed edition
In 2 weeks
$59 free delivery
The same pages as a softcover with a matte cover, posted to you. The PDF comes with it, so you can read while the book is in the post.
Send me the bookThe complete edition
The film and the printed book, with the report inside both.
$79 bought apart $98.99, you save $19.99
Thousands of people carry a clan's protection in their name and never know it. A Henderson followed the MacDonalds of Glencoe. A MacTavish answered to the Campbells. A Bethune belonged to the MacLeods of Harris. Not one of those three is the clan's own name.
The Clan Finder is a single sheet drawn as a family tree. Nine clans hang from one bough, and under every crest hangs each surname recorded as belonging to it. Find your name on a branch and you know whose records to open first.
The chart opens straight away. No waiting on an email, and you get it whether or not you tick the box.
The Old Country is a history channel about surnames, watched by people whose families left Scotland, Ireland and Germany generations ago and who want to know what they left behind. The reports came out of that. Viewers kept asking about their own name, and a video could not hold the detail.
Every report is researched the same way: parish registers, charters, government orders, the national collections, and the work of historians who have spent careers on a single clan. Nothing is padded, nothing is invented, and where the record runs out we say so on the page rather than filling the gap with something flattering. Every source is printed at the back so you can check us.
Questions before you buy? Reply to any email from us and a person answers.
No, and we say so on the first page of every report. This is the history of a surname: where it came from, the clan and country behind it, and how it reached the places its bearers live now. Bearing the name connects you to that story by name and very often by descent, but only the records of your own line can prove how yours runs. The closing chapters show you exactly where to look, which archives hold what, and what each one costs.
A report is $14.99, whether it is on the shelf or written for you. A name we have not written yet is researched and delivered within forty-eight hours at that same $14.99. There is no other charge, and if a name's record is too thin we refund you rather than pad it.
A PDF of thirty to forty pages, designed to be read on a screen or printed at home on US Letter or A4. It carries a dozen or more full-page plates of period artwork, all public domain and credited, plus a timeline, a records chapter and a ruled page for your own family notes.
Rarely. Mac, Mc and M' are the same word at three lengths, and spelling only settled in the last two centuries. Every report has a chapter on its own variants, so McDonald, MacDonald and Macdonald all read the same report.
Yes, if the record supports it. Irish and Ulster-Scots names are well within our research, and the same chapters apply: origin, the family or clan behind it, the country, the migration, the archives. If a name turns out to have too thin a record to fill a report honestly, we refund you rather than pad it.
Yes. Same price, same forty-eight hours. German names are traced through the church books, the Hamburg and Philadelphia passenger lists and the Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire, and where a name crossed as Müller and landed as Miller, the report follows it across. If the record runs too thin to fill a report honestly, you are refunded in full.
Within two days of your order. You enter your surname at checkout, we research, write and design the report, and it arrives by email as a PDF.
Museums and national collections, and every image is out of copyright or released under CC0. You will find Daniell aquatints, Horatio McCulloch oils, the Blaeu atlas of 1654 and nineteenth-century engravings, each credited with artist and date on the page it sits on. None of the imagery in these reports is AI-generated.
