Quote Originally Posted by Mike_Oettle View Post
MacSpadger, your theory about Jewish Gordons in the Baltic states may be entirely correct. But I would be interested to know where the Jewish Douglases came from.
Oh, it's not a theory, I have been shown family trees and printed documents, Gordon was a name in use in the aforementioned areas by the late 1700's at the latest. The Hebrew is גורדון and the Russian is Гордон

Jewish Douglases, well, that can be someone elses quest. There are many examples of Jews settling in the UK during the 20th century and taking on Scottish names, I was just interested in the Gordon story because there was a claim on here that Glasgow Jews had worn the Gordon tartan for 100 years, and through that it had the possibility of having a connection with the work that I am involved in. As it turns out, the connection is fuzzy, to say the very least, and it doesn't connect with evidence, but it's been fun for me anyway.
Surnames are widespread and not limited to one area.
The most common Scottish surnames, Smith, Wilson, Brown, Thomson, Walker, Taylor, Clark, Young, Miller, etc, are also found in other countires as well. Having such a surname does not mean a Scottish ancestor. Gaelic surnames are helpful in that we can pinpoint the origin. Although a Lanarkshire name, Douglas is derived from the Gaelic dubh glas, (dooh-glass), so we can be sure of it's origins for our own Scottish Douglas family, although they themselves were 11th century Flemish immigrants who originally had the family names Arkenbald and Freskin.

I don't know much about Jewish Douglases, except maybe the well known Issur Danielovitch Demsky, who used the screen name Kirk Douglas. I AM SPARTACUS!!