What is the difference between clan name and alias surname?

Question:

What is the difference between clan name and alias surname?

What is the difference between clan name and alias surname? are they the same ? or are they different?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: There's a difference, but it's not going to be easy to explain completely. There's a little history behind it.

A clan name is not necessarily a surname. Some people use their clan name as their surname (explains all the Kennedys and O'Neils in this world), but they didn't have to. Surnames, as we understand them, developed in the last 600-800 years in the British Isles...even less than that on the continent. Many were adopted from "patrynomic" devices, like taking the name of the father as the surname. And those who were Fitzpatricks, O'Neils, MacFarlanes were perfectly right to continue using their clan name as their family name...but they didn't have to.

A clan can grow to immense proportions in 400 years. Between the 900s when the first clan member was born and the 1300s when surnames came into more common usage, a good Irish Catholic family would have over 50,000 members...all living in the same area. That's a whole lot of MacFarlanes...and not such a good way to keep them all straight. So the other methods of adopting a surname were used to distinguish this Seamus from that Seamus. They could use geographic things...like Dell or Church, for something they lived near; occupational surnames like Smith, Baker and Barber; or they could use religious identification, like St. John, Trinity, Divine. All were just as legitimate as the clan name. One last way was the use of noble titles to replace a clan name. Sean Cunningham might have become the 8th Earl of Clare and his descendents use the surname "Clare". Again, perfectly legitimate in those days.

So you can have a Timothy Dell who is very much a MacFarlane. You can have a Cunningham who suddenly became a Clare. You can even have a man named Kennedy who married a Fitzgerald, but wanted to take the Fitzgerald surname from his bride because her family was more powerful and prestigious. For several hundred years, when surnames were still being worked out, these things were all perfectly acceptable.

And that's just the Irish and Scottish sides of it. Someday blow your mind and imagine a French Huguenot escaping from persecution in France who comes to Scotland and his name "LaValliere-dit-Lavigne" gets slaughtered by the heavy brogue. Dit names were "legal aliases" that gave the men two surnames that they could interchange, or use together. And then you're putting that confusion into the clanlands and having the Scots twist it into something almost unintelligibly related to the original. But that's for another day.