clanburns.scot
A site about the name, not just the man.
There are excellent Robert Burns websites, run by museums and federations and universities, and this is not trying to be one of them. They are about the poet. This is about the surname he happened to tidy up in 1786, which several hundred thousand of us carry and which almost nobody explains honestly, because the people who usually answer the question are selling wall plaques.
So: no clan chief, no ancient tartan, no coat of arms that belongs to you. What there is instead is a stream, a spelling that kept changing, a disputed connection to the Campbells, a very good 1959 design decision, and the best songs anybody has written in Scots. All of that is more interesting than the plaque.
Who is keeping this
My name is Ally Burns. I have owned this domain for years and it has sat there doing nothing, which felt like a waste of a good address. I am not a Burns scholar and I am not related to the poet, and neither is almost anybody else called Burns.
What I can do is build a small, fast, honest site that answers the questions people called Burns actually type into a search box, and say plainly where the evidence stops. If you know a part of this better than the page does, please tell me. The colophon explains how it is built, where everything came from, and what I am still unsure about.