These pages are intended to consolidate information on the RUNCIMAN (and variant names) garnered from many sources, answers being sought for the following questions:
  • Where did the RUNCIMAN name come from?
  • How many RUNCIMANs are there now?
  • How many were there?
  • Where are, and were, they?
  • How many different spellings of the name?
  • And are they all related?

We already know part of the answer to the last question from a very small sample of interested modern day RUNCIMANs who have been co-opted into the RUNCIMAN Surname DNA Project1, 2.
That answer is already "no", despite the families concerned all having their roots in the Scottish Borders.
Unsurprisingly, those Runcie Men with their horses (see Name Origin) must have come from various families.

Sporadic research over the years and contact with a number of others researching the name(s) has probably lulled me into a false sense of the scale of this project, so I will no doubt be both surprised, and swamped as more thorough investigations proceed.
Already, a simple search of the Surnames of England and Wales - ONS list3 for RUN*MAN shows, that for only England, Wales and the Isle of Man, from a database of 5.4million people sharing almost 270,000 surnames:

  • RUNCIMAN comes in with 446 names, ranking 12,425th, with
  • RUNCHMAN still in existence with 77 names, ranking 39,021th and
  • RUNCIEMAN with 61, ranking 44,978th
  • RUNCIE coming in with 123, ranking 29,082th

Although this was with the wild card version of the name (RUN*MAN) completely out of habit, I didn't actually expect to find any other variants still in existence, putting most of them down to the idiosyncracies of parish clerks from the distant past.

Assumption #1 squashed already (and that was just England).

Happy to include links to pedigrees, and to list researchers, we're all in this journey together, and so many people have already helped me over the years it seems only fair to return those favours.
For lineage information I have researched (and continue to do so), see the Lineages link in the top menu.

So, if you want to help on this journey, do contact me via the link in the page footers.

For the answers to the above questions, keep checking back at the links on the left hand side of the pages.

References:

  1. Runciman Surname DNA Project: Detail http://dnasurnames.info/lineages/spRUNCIMANLineages.htm
  2. Runciman Surname DNA Project: Summary results http://worldfamilies.net/surnames/runciman/results
  3. Surnames of England and Wales - ONS list: http://www.taliesin-arlein.net/names/, extracted Jan 2010
 

Runciman News

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