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Where do we live?

The distribution of family members across the world is a relatively straight-forward task for rare surnames like KILKIE. Other family names which are more widespread (HALLIDAY,BOYLE,ORR etc) are more difficult and "common" surnames like FIELD are impossible to tie down.

KILKIE (as far as we know) is a very specific group of people, all with Northern Irish origin and all from within a few miles of Derry city centre. See separate articles for more information in what we think the origin of the name is and how it developed from its original form MacGiollaCaoch into KILKIE.

One important question when deciding who lives where is do we count residence, visiting or where you were born? The answer I give is that it is a live website which can be updated quickly so I use where we live (or in Scottish STAY) and where we were born too.

The worldmap below gives an overview of the narrow spread of our  family. The reasons for the lack of spread are common. Surname distribution depends on having male heirs who marry and have children. Kilkie ancestors had more girls than boys and fewer of the boys married or had children. Actual decendents from the original KILKIEs number as many as other surnames but relatively few of them were men who had children. This has been particularly relevant in traditional expansion areas for other Irish surnames such as North America where very few Kilkie males emigrated and even fewer had offspring. As a biologist it interests me that girl children are so common in the Kilkie line and at some point I will do a more scientific study.

world map jan 2017

Articles in the Places menu give more details of geographic spread but in Summary KILKIE as a surname exists in ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND, CANADA, ZIMBABWE and recently EL SALVADOR and THE PHILIPPINES (thanks to Craig and Carla) and nowhere else. Decendents of Kilkie with other surnames are much wider spread and are particularly numerous in SCOTLAND and ENGLAND.

Last modified onTuesday, 03 January 2017 18:21

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