Carr has several documented origins that converged on the same modern spelling. The name can represent a Scottish Border form linked with Kerr, a northern English surname associated with marshy or scrub-covered ground, and several Irish Gaelic names that were anglicized as Carr.
The clearest illustration is a man who used two in one life.
Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, was born around 1587 in Teviotdale, younger son of Sir Thomas Kerr of Ferniehirst and his second wife Janet Scott, sister of Walter Scott of Buccleuch. He was a Kerr of the Scottish Middle March by blood, land and feud.
He went south as a page, caught James VI and I's eye after breaking his arm at a tilt in 1607, and rose to be the most powerful favorite at the English court. There he wrote himself Carr, and Carr is what the history books kept.
So the answer everybody arrives for is yes, sometimes. Which is not the same as always.
Is Carr the Same Surname as Kerr?
Sometimes. In Scottish Border records, Carr can appear as a form of Kerr, while Carr also developed independently in northern England and Ireland. Historical documents show spelling movement between Ker, Kerr and Carr in some Border lines, and Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, is a well-known example of the change.
But that traffic ran one way and only sometimes. Most people surnamed Carr have no Border connection at all, because Carr is separately one of the commonest surnames of northern England, formed independently in dozens of places from an ordinary landscape word.
The Carr surname DNA project puts it in modern terms. It has found no single Carr ancestor, but many unrelated paternal lineages, some tracking to the Border country, others to Ireland, Scandinavia and the Continent. A shared surname is a shared word, not a shared grandfather. Our guide to how Scottish surname meanings are established covers why that decides everything else.
What Does the Word Carr Actually Mean?
The main derivation is a landscape term. Old Norse kjarr means brushwood, thicket or copse, and it entered northern Middle English as ker or carr: wet scrubby ground, marsh, fen, low-lying grassland. A man who lived by the carr was called for it.
That one word explains why the name is so common and so scattered. Every district of the old Danelaw had carrs, each able to produce a family called Carr unrelated to any other.
Two further derivations have real support:
- Brittonic caer, a fort or defended enclosure, sometimes written ker. Brittonic survived in the Scottish Lowlands long enough to make this plausible for the Border name.
- Gaelic ciar, dusky or dark, proposed for Kerrs on Arran and the western seaboard, a separate community from the Border one.
Weaker suggestions circulate, such as Welsh cawr, giant. Treat those as folk etymology.
Who Were the Border Kerrs, and Were They Reivers?
The Kerrs held Teviotdale in Roxburghshire from two great houses, Cessford and Ferniehirst. Tradition brings two brothers, Ralph and Robert, north from Lancashire; Ralph's line took Ferniehirst and Robert's Cessford. Tradition is the right word. The documents start later.
What the documents show is authority. Andrew Kerr of Ferniehirst was made Warden of the Middle March in 1502; Andrew Kerr of Cessford took the office in 1513, after Flodden. The family also ran one of the bloodiest feuds in Scottish history, against the Scotts: Kerr of Cessford was killed at Melrose in 1526, and in 1552 the Kerrs killed Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch in the High Street of Edinburgh.
Here is a correction worth having. When the Scottish Parliament drew up its roll of unruly Border clans in 1587, it listed Elliot, Armstrong, Nixon and Crozier in the Middle March, and Scott of Ewesdale, Beattie, Little, Thomson, Glendinning, Irving, Bell, Carruthers, Graham, Johnstone, Jardine, Moffat and Latimer in the West. The Kerrs are not on it.
They were not being excused. They were on the other side of the paperwork, holding the wardenries meant to police the men who were listed. If your Carr line really does reach Teviotdale, you are likelier descended from the administration than the raiders, however much less romantic that sounds. Our histories of Clan Kerr and of the Scotts of Buccleuch follow the feud from the other end, and Floors Castle is where the Cessford line ended up.
Were the Northumberland Carrs a Branch of the Kerrs?
The Carrs of north Northumberland were a serious Border family in their own right, and usually where an English Carr line leads.
Thomas Carr of Etal married Elizabeth Heron in 1549 and took Ford Castle with her, a few miles from the Tweed and in the path of every Scottish army that came south. The French besieged it that year during the Rough Wooing; the Herons seized it back in March 1557; that August a Scottish force under two of James V's sons and Lord Home came over with artillery and burned the ten towns of Glendale. The Carrs held it about a century.
Further east, Newcastle upon Tyne turned out mayors named Carr for three centuries, from George Carr in the 1480s through a line of Ralphs and Williams. A merchant dynasty, not a riding surname.
Are they Kerrs? No charter evidence says so, and the geography argues against it: the Northumberland Carrs sat in the English Middle March, frequently at war with the Scottish Kerrs across the line. Two similar names on opposite sides of a border is the likeliest reading, and the distribution supports it.
Why Are There Ten Kerrs in Scotland for Every Carr?
The census settles this better than any tradition. In the 1901 Scottish census there were 16,100 people surnamed Kerr, the 41st commonest name in the country. Carr had 1,647, ranking 483rd; Ker had 281. If Carr were simply the Border name in another jacket, that ratio would look different.
Now cross the line. The 1881 census of Great Britain counted roughly 21,677 Carrs, massed in Yorkshire with about 4,249, Lancashire with 3,109, County Durham with 2,893 and Northumberland with 1,896.
Read together they give the plain fact of the matter. In Scotland the Border name is written Kerr. Carr is an English name that also occurs in Scotland, and a fair share of Scottish Carrs arrived with nineteenth-century Irish migration into Glasgow and the west rather than from Teviotdale. Names that look alike without being the same trip up researchers constantly, as our history of the unrelated Carron surname shows.
How Did Carr Become an Irish Surname?
Two ways, running in opposite directions.
The first is settlement. Lowland Scots carrying Kerr crossed to Ulster from the early seventeenth century, and Fermanagh holds a particular concentration from Border stock, as set out in our accounts of Ulster Plantation surnames and the reiver families who became the Scots-Irish.
The second is translation, and has nothing to do with Scotland. Clerks used Carr and Kerr to render several unconnected Gaelic surnames: Mac Giolla Chathair in Donegal, Ó Cairre and Mac Cairre in Armagh, Mac Giolla Cheara in Monaghan. Elsewhere Carr stands in for names built on gearr, short of stature.
An Irish Carr and a Border Carr can share a surname, a county and a century without sharing an ancestor. Many went on to America together anyway, by the route traced in From Ulster to Appalachia.
Is It True That the Kerrs and Carrs Were Left-Handed?
This is one of the best-known traditions attached to the Kerr name. Border lore links the family with left-handed swordsmen and the stairways at Ferniehirst, and the story has been repeated for generations.
The Scots language adds an interesting parallel. Car, also written caur, ker and carr, is an old Scots adjective meaning left or left-handed and survives in forms such as car-handit and corrie-fisted. That linguistic overlap helped give the tradition a lasting place in Kerr and Carr folklore.
How Do You Trace a Carr Family?
- Decide which Carr you have before going back past 1800. Border, northern English and Irish are three different research problems.
- Search Carr, Kerr, Ker and Carre together in Scottish sources, and Carr with Kerr and Karr in English ones. Never one alone.
- Anchor every result to a parish. In Scotland that means Roxburghshire for the Border line, Lanarkshire or Renfrewshire for much of the nineteenth-century Irish influx.
- For the English line, work the Northumberland and Durham registers with the Newcastle freemen records, unusually deep for this name.
- Start from a post-1855 statutory certificate and work backward, as our beginner's guide to ScotlandsPeople shows.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Carr Name
Is Carr Scottish, English or Irish?
All three, from separate origins: a spelling of the Border name Kerr, an independent northern English name from a word for marshy scrubland, and an anglicization of several Gaelic Irish surnames. Only your own records tell you which.
Is Carr a sept of Clan Kerr?
Carr is accepted as a form of the Kerr name, so a Carr family with documented Border descent sits within that association. One from Yorkshire or Donegal does not, whatever a name-based list may say.
Was Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, Scottish?
Yes. He was born a Kerr of Ferniehirst in Teviotdale and adopted the Carr spelling in England. He was convicted in 1616 over the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, though the sentence was never carried out.
Does the Carr surname have a Family Crest?
Carr Family Crest designs are a familiar way to celebrate the surname’s heritage. Because Carr also has separate Scottish, English and Irish histories, the wider family story is best explored through the places and records connected with a particular branch.
Sources and Further Reading
- Clan Kerr — spelling variants, the Cessford and Ferniehirst branches, the wardenries and the Scott feud.
- Carr (surname) — the Old Norse kjarr derivation and competing Gaelic and Brittonic readings.
- John Grenham: Carr surname history — the Gaelic originals behind Carr and Kerr, county by county.
- Guide to North East Surnames: Carr — 1881 county counts and the Newcastle mayors.
- The unruly Border clans of 1587 — the surnames the Act names, and those it does not.
- Carr in the 1901 Scottish census — swap the name in the URL to compare Kerr and Ker directly.
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language: car, left-handed — the Scots adjective, its range and Gaelic root.
- George F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland — the standard reference for early forms.
Explore the Scottish Carr designs alongside Kerr in our Kerr and Scottish Carr collection.