In 1435 a Fife landholder is entered in the record as Jacobus Traill de Blabok, James Traill of Blebo, and that is where this surname becomes solid ground. The University of Glasgow's Fife place-name project carries the form, alongside a James Traill of Blabo in 1513 in a dispute over neighboring land.
A useful place to start, because the country most people associate with the name lies two hundred miles north of that charter, in Orkney.
What Does the Name Traill Mean?
Nobody has established it, and the honest answer is better than the popular one. The Oxford-backed dictionary of American family names files Traill as a variant of Trail, and its entry for Trail reads: "Scottish: unexplained perhaps from a lost or unidentified placename. There is a stream called Abhainn Traill running into Upper Loch Torridon (Ross and Cromarty)." That is the whole of it, with the Torridon burn offered as a comparison rather than a source.
You will also see the name traced confidently to Norse settlers or to a Norman family arriving by way of France. Neither reading is carried by the surname dictionaries, and neither should be repeated as settled. Place-name surnames of known origin are handled in our piece on the Cairnie name; Traill is not one of them.
Where Was Blebo, and Why Does It Matter?
Blebo is in central Fife, a few miles east of Cupar, filed by the place-name survey under the old parish of Kemback. The name is far older than the family: Bladebolg in 1140, Bladbolg about 1220, Blabok in 1435, Blabo between 1452 and 1480, Blebo by 1593. Scholars read it as a Pictish formation meaning something like "meal sack," either for milling or for the rounded hill beside Blebo House.
The Traills held it for the best part of two centuries before the property was divided in 1609, and lead and silver were found there in 1722, which is how the village of Blebo Craigs came about. The Fife background is covered in our history of Cupar and the Coupar name.
How Did the Traills Reach Orkney?
By a sixteenth-century branch of the Fife family moving north, then by buying land and not letting go of it. The Holland estate on Papa Westray, one of the small north isles, was bought by Thomas Traill in 1637 and stayed with the family until 1952: three hundred and fifteen years. George Traill built the present house between 1810 and 1814, and when his kelp business fell away in the 1830s he put the money into the farm, raising a horse engine house that was probably the first horse-powered threshing mill in Orkney. The family is buried in its own section inside nearby St Boniface's Church.
That is what makes Traill an Orkney name in practice rather than tradition: a Fife surname that became a northern landowning one. The record world it joined appears in our history of the Drever name in Orkney and our survey of the families of Caithness and the far north.
Who Was the Rousay Laird?
The hardest chapter the name carries, and it deserves stating carefully rather than either way round. Frederick William Burroughs was born at Fatehgarh in British India on 1 February 1831 and took the surname Traill at twenty-one, on succeeding to the Orkney estates left him by his great-uncle George William Traill. Short, and known across the island as "the little general," he built Trumland House on Rousay to a design by David Bryce of Edinburgh, and the poet Edwin Muir remembered watching him walk his estates as a child.
Rousay tenants brought grievances to the Napier Commission in 1883, and two of the men who gave evidence, James Leonard and James Grieve, were afterward put off their holdings. The record is not one-sided: the same accounts note that neither evicted man held a legal tenancy, both having declined one when offered, and that when crofters could not reach the Orkney Mainland, Traill-Burroughs carried them there in his own boat. He died in London on 9 April 1905. Read him beside our accounts of the Highland Clearances and of the Burroughs surname he was born with.
Is Traill's Flycatcher Named After a Traill?
It is, and after an Orkney one. Thomas Stewart Traill was born in Kirkwall on 29 October 1781, took his MD at Edinburgh in 1802 under Alexander Monro, returned in 1832 as Regius Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Medical Police, and from 1847 edited the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, twenty-one volumes finished in 1861. He died in Edinburgh on 30 July 1862.
John James Audubon, a friend, named Traill's flycatcher after him in 1828. In 1973 the American Ornithological Society split the bird into the alder flycatcher and the willow flycatcher, and the willow kept the scientific name Empidonax traillii. The maroon oriole, Oriolus traillii, and Traill Island in Greenland carry his name too. A Kirkwall doctor's surname is therefore attached to a bird most American birders have argued about at least once.
How Should a Traill Line Be Traced?
- Search Traill, Trail, Traile, Trayll and Trell together. The single and double l alternate freely in Scottish registers.
- Split the search geographically: Fife for the older layer, around Cupar, Kemback and Blebo; Orkney for the modern one, with Papa Westray, Rousay, Birsay and Kirkwall first.
- Use estate and testamentary papers, not just registers. For a landholding family, sasines, retours and wills carry more than baptisms.
- Work backward from a post-1855 certificate using our note on civil registration and our guide to ScotlandsPeople.
Own a Piece of Traill Heritage
Papa Westray held this family for 315 years, from a purchase in 1637 to a sale in 1952, and that is the tenure that turned a Fife surname into an Orkney one. Four Traill pieces are made: a T-shirt, a mug, a garden flag and a keepsake ornament in a silver frame, the family crest set on a tartan background. Traill belongs to landed families rather than to a chiefly line, so that cloth was chosen for the design rather than handed to the surname; our explainer on why the tartan distinction matters sets out the reason.
Traill Family Crest Garden Flag
Frequently Asked Questions About the Traill Name
Is Traill an Orkney surname or a Fife one?
Both, in that order of time. The earliest firm record is Fife, with James Traill of Blebo in 1435. A branch moved north in the sixteenth century and became one of the northern isles' notable landholding families, buying Holland on Papa Westray in 1637.
What does Traill mean?
It is unexplained. The Oxford-backed dictionary suggests a lost or unidentified place-name and offers the burn Abhainn Traill above Loch Torridon as a comparison. Norse and Norman derivations circulate but are not supported by the dictionaries.
Are Trail and Traill the same name?
Yes. Traill is filed as a variant of Trail, and Scottish clerks moved between the spellings without meaning anything by it.
Is there a Clan Traill?
No. Traill is an old landed family name with no chief and no clan body, which is not the same as being obscure: 413 people carried it in Scotland in 1901.
Sources and Further Reading
- Fife Place-name Data, University of Glasgow: Blebo — the early forms from Bladebolg in 1140, the Pictish reading, and Jacobus Traill de Blabok in 1435.
- Dictionary of American Family Names: Traill and Trail — "Scottish: unexplained perhaps from a lost or unidentified placename," and the Abhainn Traill comparison.
- Holland House, Papa Westray — Thomas Traill's purchase in 1637, the house of 1810 to 1814, the kelp collapse and the threshing mill, and the family's tenure to 1952.
- Thomas Stewart Traill — Kirkwall 1781, the Edinburgh chair of 1832, the eighth Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the species named for him.
- Traill's flycatcher — Audubon's naming in 1828 and the 1973 split into alder and willow flycatchers.
- Frederick Traill-Burroughs — the change of surname, Trumland House, the Napier Commission evidence of 1883 and the arguments on both sides.
- Traill as a surname — the Blebo holding, the 1609 division, Blebo Craigs, and the sixteenth-century move to Orkney.
- Traill in the 1901 Scottish census — 413 bearers, ranked 1,344th.
- ScotlandsPeople — National Records of Scotland registers, sasines, wills and census images.
The dictionaries still file the meaning as unexplained, which is the honest position whatever the Norse and Norman stories promise. Traill keepsakes are here.