Your comments are quite on point regarding the true original "nationality" of you given name. Many of similar name could orignate from numerous sites across the world, mostly Europe but not all.

We Forresters/Forsters/Fosters have separate but overlapping histories from Scotland, England, Ireland (probably Scottish diaspora), Flanders and France (Forestiere's) that I know of. Which branch of the "family" you herald from is only known to you through chasing back your own ancestry as far as you can, often hundreds or potentially a thousand years to see just what you can find.

Or you can take the short route and find your nearest scottish relative, preferably on your paternal side if available, and do a simple sept search to see what major clan that family was likely allied to as described above.

Being a Forrester, and knowing there is a southern Scottish and northern English background to my most recent related family origins, it is a reasonable assumption that we were a sept of the Douglas clan of the same region, both famous Border families and rievers, although I cannot prove it (yet) with more definitive lineage charts. However, some of the more northern and western Scottish Forresters were septs of the MacDonald clans, so who is to say that I am not from that branch, unless I do the ancestry lineage homework to tell for sure. Does that mean that I cannot wear either the Douglas or MacDonalds tartans? I think that depends on how particular you desire to be with documenting your ancestral "right" to wear a specific tartan. I wear them both, with pride and respect, and will continue to do so untiol I find out differently by further ancestral snooping.

jeff

Quote Originally Posted by MacBean View Post
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.