The history of your name

The ROBERTSON surname in the USA

Frequency Comparisons
Total Rank Frequency % Per million people
United States
United States (Current snapshot) 150,299 159 0.056 557
United States (1880 census) 35,993 141 0.072 720
Change since 1880 +114306 -18 -0.016 -163
Other Countries
Australia 15,523 64 0.095 950
United Kingdom 53,862 76 0.117 1,173
Notes

'A figure of zero indicates that we don't have data for this name (usually because it's quite uncommon and our stats don't go down that far). It doesn't mean that there's no-one with that name at all!

For less common surnames, the figures get progressively less reliable the fewer holders of that name there are. This data is aggregated from several public lists, and some stats are interpolated from known values. The margin of error is well over 100% at the rarest end of the table!

For less common surnames, the frequency and "per million" values may be 0 even though there are people with that name. That's because they represent less than one in a million of the population, which ends up as 0 after rounding.

It's possible for a surname to gain in rank and/or total while being less common per million people (or vice versa) as there are now more surnames in the USA as a result of immigration. In mathematical terms, the tail has got longer, with a far larger number of less common surnames.

Classification and Origin of ROBERTSON

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: Scotland

Language of origin: Gaelic

Ethnic origin: Celtic

Religious origin: Christian

Name derivation: From given name or forename

Data for religion and/or language relates to the culture in which the ROBERTSON surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the language spoken, or religion practised, by the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Data for ethnic origin relates to the region and country in which the ROBERTSON surname originated. It does not necessarily have any correlation with the ethnicity of the majority of current American citizens with that name.

Ethnic distribution of ROBERTSON in the USA

Classification Total Percent
Asian/Pacific 616 0.41
White (Caucasian) 113,250 75.35
Black/African American 30,421 20.24
Mixed Race 2,330 1.55
White (Hispanic) 2,375 1.58
Native American/Alaskan 1,308 0.87

Ethnic distribution data shows the number and percentage of people with the ROBERTSON surname who reported their ethnic background as being in these broad categories in the most recent national census.

Meaning of ROBERTSON in historical publications

ROBERTSON. See Robert. A Highland clan bear this name. The Robertsons of Struau, co. Perth, are unquestionably one of the oldest families in Scotland, descending both from the Mac Donalds, Lords of the Isles, and from the ancient Earls of Athol. The surname is derived from Robert, son of Duncan (de Atholia) who arrested the murderers of James I., and for that service received a royal charter, erecting his lands into a free barony, A.D. 1-151. Alexander, his son, adopted the surname Robertson, which became persistent.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.


Similar names to ROBERTSON

The following names have similar spellings or pronunciations as ROBERTSON.

This does not necessarily imply a direct relationship between the names, but may indicate names that could be mistaken for this one when written down or misheard.

Matches are generated automatically by a combination of Soundex, Metaphone and Levenshtein matching.

Potential typos for ROBERTSON

The following words are slight variants of ROBERTSON that are likely to be possible typos or misspellings in written material.