<a href="http://forebears.io/surnames/nicdomhnaill" rel="nofollow">http://forebears.io/surnames/nicdomhnaill</a><p>Any surname starting with "Nic" and ending with a Gaelic personal name is a woman's surname. Nic is a contraction of "nighean mhic" (Scottish) / "iníon mhic" (Irish), meaning "daughter of a son of," and is equivalent to Mac (son of) for girls and women.<p>This particular name is the feminine Gaelic form of MacDomhnall (MacDonald in English), though it's misspelled. The initial consonant in Domhnall should be lenited to produce NicDhomhnaill, and if it's Scottish, there should be a grave over the "o."
One problem with this sort of 'Genealogical' website is their total English language tunnel vision.<p>If your surname is short then it will probably have multiple source and saying the equivalent of "Surnameis 'Smith' therefore your family were once black smiths" is missing the fact that if your name came from a different country then that word means something different.<p>Maybe in the future they'll get more sophisticated.
The surname meaning for "Tobin" is also wrong, it comes from a Norman surname "de Saint Aubyn", which I guess the native Irish had a hard time pronouncing. The website suggested it came from "son of Tobias" (which I guess might have happened at some point, but is not the usually given history of the name).<p>Interesting that the three surnames with incorrect histories highlighted in the comments (so far) are all of Irish origin. Maybe the site is particularly poor with Irish surname origins?
This is cool. But it was wrong for my mother's name bonnar.<p><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/surname/index.cfm?fuseaction=Go.&Surname=Bonnar" rel="nofollow">http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/surname/index.cfm?fuseact...</a>
I've wondered at how, despite surnames being our "clan" or "family" names (and therefore a collection of people) and our first being our individual names, I seem to meet many more people who share firstnames than surnames.<p>Any way of telling how wrong I am?