So Scott, this interests me. If Brown is a sept of MacMillan or Lamont, how does a Brown in the present, and some distance from his ancestry, know if their family is Scottish at all? Couldn't Brown be, say, English, too? Oddly, Lamont is a common name in my family, but no one has any record of why. Similarly, the other day I met a Bean who said his family was Polish! That made me think a bit! Are Lanes in English descendents of Scottish MacLeans perhaps? Do we make many mistakes hanging too much on a name? I noticed in times long past, the Highland surnames were more often first names (if that had any meaning at all)...hence the common debate about whether King MacBeth was any relative of the MacBeans. Too many questions, mostly unanswerable, but I'd be interested in what you had to say.