The Compensation Surname Map
A long-running attempt to map surname clusters within the 1837 awards back to specific Scottish merchant families and estate trusts.
CompensationSurname IndexGenealogy
The map is built from the awards outward rather than from family-history research inward, which avoids the common problem of starting with a story and looking for documents to fit it.
Surname clusters are grouped by award amount band, geography of claim, and the presence of co-claimants, which together carry more weight than any one of them alone.
The map remains incomplete on purpose. Several clusters resist being mapped to a single family and the project records this rather than forcing a fit.