I should really at my age have learned not to dash off provocative emails. However, I wanted to draw attention to something which is a misunderstanding which has been so frequently repeated to the point that it is regarded as 'true'. The misunderstanding arises from what Black says in his book The Surnames of Scotland. He starts his article on Baxter by saying that it meant 'originally a woman that baked.,' and then goes on to relate the ending of the Old English word bæcestre to the agent suffix ster. What, however, he does not say is what he means by 'originally', because this word was already used in Anglo-Saxon times for a male baker. The truth of the matter is that, by the time surnames were coming into existence in Scotland, the word baxter referred usually to a male baker. What is of much more significance to those studying families in the past is that baxter belongs to a family of words ending in -ster and referring to occupations, which survived in Scotland far longer than they did in England and several of which became surnames. Others are brewster, dempster (the person who gave out the sentence in a criminal trial), dyster, huckster, kemster ( wool-comber), litster (dyer), maltster, sewster, spinster and webster . Almost all, except dempster, could be used for both men and women, but kemster, sewster and spinster most often referred to women. The surnames derived from these give Lowland surnames but the actual names for the occupations can all be found in Argyll documents of the 18th century and earlier. Frank Bigwood