I have accumulated too many half-finished documents, so I am trying to deal with them one way or another: finish them, or delete them. They are no longer allowed to linger indefinitely as fragments in my drafts folder.
One of those fragments began with a small irritation. Over the past few years I have read several books by Robert Macfarlane, which means I have had to type his name more than once. On my phone, using Gboard, typing “macfarlane” consistently produces MacFarlane as the first suggestion.
Later, after spotting what seemed to be a mistaken quotation in A World Made from Dust, I emailed the author, Ben McFarland. That made the resemblance between the two surnames difficult to ignore: both appeared to contain two capital letters. Then, while reading John McPhee’s Oranges, I finally became too curious about the phenomenon to leave it alone.
Where the second capital comes from
A quick search suggested that an internal capital often signals a surname formed by joining two originally independent elements. MacDonald, for example, can be understood as Mac + Donald: “son of Donald.” Keeping the capital in Donald preserves a trace of the name’s original structure.
Several recurring surname elements work in a similar way:
- Mac / Mc — Gaelic, especially Scottish and Irish, meaning “son of”
- Fitz — from Anglo-Norman French, also meaning “son of”
- O’ — Irish, meaning “descendant of”
- Van / Von — Dutch or German, broadly meaning “from” or “of”
Once I started noticing them, Mac and Mc surnames seemed to appear everywhere. Among writers I had encountered in just the past couple of years were Robert Macfarlane, Ben McFarland, Helen MacDonald, John McPhee, and Cormac McCarthy. The list could go on almost indefinitely.
With Fitz, the most obvious literary example is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby. Irish O’ surnames are equally familiar; Flannery O’Connor is one example. Van and Von are often written as separate elements, but not always. Some families have removed the space, and capitalization varies as well. Mark Vanhoenacker, the author of Skyfaring, offers an example with no space—and no second capital.
That answered one question, but created another. If these elements indicate “son of” or “from” followed by a name, why does the second capital sometimes disappear?
One explanation is that the element after the prefix was not necessarily a personal name. It might have referred to an occupation: master, baker, or something similar. In that case, there would be no proper name requiring a capital letter. But this does not fully account for Macfarlane, whose second element is generally understood to have developed from a name.
Besides, English surnames derived from occupations are common in their own right. Baker and Carpenter can be family names, but they can also simply describe someone’s work. At what point one becomes the other is not always clear.
The explanation I find more convincing is less tidy: these spellings are the result of long historical change, family preference, and, occasionally, an ordinary spelling mistake that became permanent. Consider the many forms associated with McFarlane alone: Mcfarlan, Mcfarlane, Mcfarlain, McFarlin, McFarling, McFarlen, and McFarland. That list does not even include the variations beginning with Mac, or the differences created by capitalization.
A problem for databases—and for people who care about their names
Once spelling becomes a matter of individual or family choice, standardization becomes surprisingly difficult. A digital archive cannot simply capitalize the first letter of every surname and expect the result to be correct. Even a list of exceptions would not solve everything, since Macfarlane and MacFarlane can both exist at the same time.
Some people are understandably unwilling to treat the distinction as cosmetic. An American politician named Ed FitzGerald once instructed administrative staff that he would refuse to sign documents in which the capitalization of his surname was wrong. For him, a difference that amounted to only one letter being uppercase was still a spelling error.
That brings to mind another, much more deliberate exception: bell hooks—and yes, the lowercase spelling is intentional. Her name required institutions and editors to remember a format that runs against ordinary naming conventions. In her case, the choice was not primarily a residue of family history but a form of self-definition. She said the lowercase name was meant to direct readers toward “the substance of books, not who I am.” I have to admit that I am not entirely persuaded by the idea, but the point is unmistakable: capitalization can carry meaning beyond grammar.
What a surname can reveal
The subject becomes more interesting when viewed through etymology. A surname is not a complete record of ancestry, but it can offer clues about family history and migration.
Robert Macfarlane does have Scottish ancestry. John McPhee is unmistakably an American writer, yet his family history can also be traced back to the Scottish islands; he even wrote a book about that connection, The Crofter and the Laird.
An O’ at the beginning of a surname often suggests an Irish connection, but the connection need not be purely genealogical. Many Black Americans have surnames beginning with O’, as well as names with strong Irish associations such as Murphy and Morrison. One explanation is that Black communities and Irish immigrants once lived alongside each other in some of the poorest neighborhoods, allowing names and naming traditions to circulate in ways that do not necessarily reflect direct descent.
There is also an amusing historical implication here: these names were not usually inherited from wealthy Irish plantation owners of the sort represented by Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Irish immigrants at the time were generally too poor to own land. The history behind a surname can therefore be considerably more complicated than its surface appearance suggests.
Perhaps that is why family history and ancestry hold such a persistent fascination. When the evidence is incomplete, a name can feel like one of the few remaining clues. It invites the question that is difficult to suppress once it occurs: where, exactly, did I come from?