This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: gmuckart1 Surnames: Muckart, Murkar Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/localities.britisles.scotland.ans.general/2153.1.1.1.1/mb.ashx Message Board Post: Hi Pat, As soon as I received your reply I immediately went to the front page of Scotlandspeople website and stuck in the name Murkar in the free surname search box. This is a wonderful free window into the Scotlandspeople database. It will not give exact results but will tell you if a surname is in their database and in which records it shows up in. It will also tell you the frequency with which it occurs. This alone can be very helpful. From my search I can see that Murkar as a Surname is effectively unknown in Scotland. There are only 2 people with this surname in the whole of the 1881 Census for Scotland. There are also 2 deaths recorded under the surname Murkar in Scotland in the 1855-2006 time period. There are 4 entries in the O.P.R.'s for births and 3 entries for births and marriages. My hunch would be that these entries all relate to one family who lived in Scotland in the 1850-1900 time period. You may well find that these Murkars relate to yours. It would be interesting ! to see if these Murkars also lived near Gamrie. Surname drift is almost always ignored by newcomers to family history research. I know I did when I first started. It was only when I kept bumping into more and more evidence that my surname had been spelled in many different ways in the past that my cosy modern views started to crumble. We all tend to impose our understanding of the world as it is today onto any attempt we make to view the past. It is quite easy to think that the way things are now is the way things have always been. It takes some doing to set aside our modern day pre-conceptions and try to see the world as it was 100-150 years ago. To answer your question, I have not come across this surname as a known variant of the surname Muckart but I suppose it can't be ruled out. I have found about 20 or so variants that all lead back to Muckart. The main concentration of Muckarts were in the southern half of Kincardineshire in the 1700-1850 period. Before this they were in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. It would not t! ake much for a Parish Clerk to write the surname down as he heard it and record Muckart as Murkar. Especially if he was not a local and the father or mother having a child baptized spoke in a broad aberdonian accent. Remember most farming folk would have little use for book learning, as they saw it. Grant Muckart Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.