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

From current constitutional monarchies to ancient dynasties that have lasted for hundreds of years, these powerful royal last names are full of gravitas. Explore the famous and lesser-known royal ...

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 ...

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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 ...

While Smith and Jones remain Britain's most popular surnames, new research has found that Asian names such as Zhang, Singh and Patel are rapidly catching up. 24 March 2009 • 6:30am A century of ...

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 ...

Researchers have shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of the research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, ...

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.