MCDONALD in the 1881 British Census

Notes

County and town names are as used on the 1881 census, and may not necessarily correlate with modern names and borders. Where a Scottish county is now known by a significantly different name, the modern name is shown in brackets. Welsh counties are shown in both English and Welsh names.

The Total Occurrences tables show which counties and towns contained the highest number of people with the surname MCDONALD. This is obviously biased towards counties and towns that have more people in them overall, but it does show where the majority of people called MCDONALD lived at the time of the 1881 census.

The Frequency tables show which counties and towns had the highest proportion of people with the surname MCDONALD. These are the places where you would be most likely to find someone called MCDONALD, if you picked people at random from the population.

• The Total column shows the total number of people in that county or town with this surname. For example, there were 71 people called MCDONALD in Inverness-shire at the time of the 1881 census.
• The Frequency column shows the percentage of people in this county or town with this surname. For example, a frequency of 0.0814 in Inverness-shire means that 0.0814% of the people in Inverness-shire on census day were called MCDONALD.
• The Index column shows the relative probability of finding someone called MCDONALD in this county or town, compared with the probability of finding them anywhere in Britain as a whole. An index of 1 means that if you pick someone at random from this county or town, you have exactly the same probability of picking someone called MCDONALD a if you picked at random from the whole of the UK. If the index is higher than 1, then you are more likely to find someoen called MCDONALD here than if you picked from the UK as a whole, and if it's lower then you are less likely. The actual figure shows the level of probability - for example, a figure of 2 would indicate that you are twice as likely to find someone called MCDONALD here than in the UK as a whole, and 10 would make it ten times as likely. The value of 10.0215 in Inverness-shire means that you are 10.0215 times as likely to find someone with the surname of MCDONALD in Inverness-shire than you would be in the whole of the UK.

The maximum Index values tend to be higher for towns than counties, as a single extended family in a small town can comprise a significant proportion of the total population. For less common surnames, it's quite likely that all the residents of a small town who shared that name were related.