On Sep 11, 2010, at 12:56 AM, MichaelWright12 wrote: > Catline Wright (author of the piece you reference) writes a pretty > piece on the origins of the Wright surname. Unfortunately there is > very little truth to any of it. Nothing is ever so elegant or > simple as Catline has suggested. It is a pretty piece and may even be partly true, but it would take some very hard slogging to separate the leaps of faith from actual history > > For starters, there is no root word in the Celtic languages of pre- > Conquest Northern England that would lead to any form of the Wright > surname, so that identifying the north of England as the seat of > the origin of the surname is extremely improbable. This isn't necessarily true either. Clan MacIntyre claims a sort of kinship with the Wrights by naming the Wright family as a sept of Clan Macintyre. MacIntyre derives from the Scots Gaelic 'Mac an-t- Saoir' meaning son of ship-builder or son of carpenter. It doesn't seem like a big leap of faith to infer some common ancestry between North English Wrights and Scottish MacIntyres, given that the borders were pretty fluid. That doesn't prove that all the Wrights have a north England origin--'wright' is a Saxon word for 'builder' or 'maker' and the Saxons first arrived in the south and east of England, and there were plenty of builders all over England. The MacIntyre surname goes back a lot further than written records and it's impossible to separate legend from fact, but you can find a good presentation of both at <http://www.electricscotland.com/ webclans/m/macintyre/> Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at [email protected] | this distance" (last words of Gen. .......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864) http://www.skypoint.com/members/chrisw/