Ancesrty Research: Porteous et al

Well that about wraps it up. So odd, because if anyone was English it had to have been deceased grandmother; she admired the royals and endeavoured to talk like them and told me off for picking up too much 'geordie' speak when I started secondary school. Alas, her maiden name is a derivation from these lads and lasses.

"It should be noted that, for the purpose of this research, when discussing the Porteous/Porteus family, we are including members of families bearing the many variant spellings, such as Portteus, Porteouss, Porteious, Portieous, Portious, Portiss, Portice, Portes, Portess, Portis, Portas, Pertus, Portus, Porteuse, Poythress and Porthouse, and others."

I had many reasons for naively presuming all that side of the family were English but I guess they don't really look English either. Besides some of 'em have red hair also - not definitive, nothing is, but in terms of likelihood, we'll call it corroborating evidence. In ancestry research, everything is relative. (oh I hope you found that as punny as I did...)

So that has the scoreboard at 1/16 Welsh, 2/16 Irish and most of the rest Scottish (and in this 2/16 case, perhaps somewhat Norman also, according to link below), barring a few (~4/16) that I would rate as 'known unknowns', either English, English-Norman or Scottish. Fun stuff.

Oh and look, Veitch, as in The Love Police, and Tweedie, as in Cheryl's name before she sold out and became Sir Cowell's mass manipulation vector. lol, small world innit?.

PS/Disclaimer: A lot of surnames are ambiguous and you can't always tell, and the worst thing to do in this is jump to conclusions in any way. For instance someone else I know who is not related to me, found that one of their ancestors with an apparently English name, was actually an Irish person who had switched their name back in the mid 1800s, seemingly because no-one in this country would employ him. Sad. So, stuff happens, and names cannot be relied upon as more than a rough guide.

Besides, the more you dig the more names you find, and the more fragmented your picture becomes, of course. So you rely on generalisations with a decent degree of likelihood.

Ethnic differences are a lot like the colours of the rainbow (and by using that analogy, I in no way intend to further the great PC myth, that ethnic differences are primarily colour-oriented). If you look closely enough, there is no single point where red ends and orange begins, or where blue ends and indigo begins. (This is why white nationalists have such a nightmare deciding "who is white" - an impossible task!)

But when you take a step back, it would be madness to deny that there are different colours in a rainbow, and it would be equally mad to say that there are no ethnic differences, either.