Does your surname link you to royalty – or does it mark out your ancestors as fools, philanderers – or just plain ugly?

Long before Lorde, Adele, or even Cher, one name was all a person needed. In Britain before the Norman Conquest of 1066, people went by single names. If a village had an overabundance of Toms, one ...

Rare surnames are dropping out of national records at an "alarming" rate with some down to just a few hundred, research has shown. While the top 10 surnames in England and Wales have been "relatively" ...

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Many of us like to imagine we are distantly related to royalty and that like Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries we will be whisked away to live in a castle. Some celebrities are known to have a ...

Research led by University of Leicester geneticists, comparing the DNA of 150 pairs of men who share British surnames, has shown that about a quarter of pairs are linked genetically. Their findings ...

British scientists, working on techniques which could help know a person's surname from his DNA, have found that between two men sharing the same surname there is a 24 per cent chance of having a ...

It’s the question on everyone’s lips when a royal baby arrives: what do the British royal family use as a last name? Well, the answer is definitely not so simple, so bear with us. Basically, before ...

So according to the Guild of One-Name Studies, an organisation devoted to the study of family names, “traditional English surnames” such as Mackmain, Bythewood, Foothead and Pauncefoot, are dying out.