Cushney takes its name from a cold corner of Aberdeenshire: the old lands and parish of Cushnie, southwest of Alford on the high ground of Donside.
Much of that parish sits around 1,000 feet, and the winters are long enough that one reading of the Gaelic makes the name Cuisneach, the frosty place. A rival reading takes it from a Celtic word for a corner of country. Neither is settled, and a confident translation is a guess.
The shape of the surname is not in doubt. Cushney is territorial: it says where a family came from, not what it did.
Was There Really a Cushnie Family?
Yes, unusually for a name this small.
The accounts that have come down report a family styled Cusnie holding these lands from the twelfth century or earlier, the Leslies acquiring them by marriage in the early fourteenth. That is the ordinary route by which a Gaelic place-name became a surname: holders took the ground's name, the ground changed hands, the name left with the tenants.
By the early seventeenth century the Lumsdens held it, on the evidence of a carved armorial panel with the initials RL and ER and the date 1618. Little else survives: Canmore lists Cushnie Castle as a medieval site at NJ c. 52 11, an Ordnance Survey visit in 1968 found nothing standing, and the tower was probably superseded by Cushnie Lodge of 1707. Our histories of the Lumsdens and the Leslies of Aberdeenshire follow the families who took over.
The parish's famous building is not the Cushnie tower but Craigievar Castle, finished for William Forbes in the 1620s. A Cushney ancestor watched it go up.
Cushney, Cushnie or Cushny?
Three spellings, one name, very different survival rates.
The 1901 census of Scotland found 107 people surnamed Cushnie, ranking it 3,124th, and exactly five Cushneys, ranking that spelling 21,294th. Cushny is a third form. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland treats the group as one, deriving Cushnie as a habitational name from Cushnie in Leochel and sending Cushley to the same entry.
The best-known bearer of the three is Arthur Robertson Cushny, born at Fochabers in Moray on 6 March 1866, son of the Reverend John Cushny of Speymouth. He took his MA at Aberdeen in 1886 and his medical degrees at Marischal College, then held chairs of pharmacology at Michigan, University College London and Edinburgh from 1918. He produced the first experimental analysis of digitalis in warm-blooded animals, was elected to the Royal Society in 1907, and died in Edinburgh in 1926.
No descent has been shown from him to the Aberdeenshire lands, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. The spelling belongs to the same north-eastern cluster; that is all.
Where Are the Cushney Records?
In a parish that spent two centuries deciding whether it was one or two.
Leochel and Cushnie were joined in 1618, separated again, and finally united as Leochel-Cushnie in 1795. The registers do not begin together: the oldest Leochel entries are deaths from 1657, Cushnie births from around 1730. The parish sat in the Presbytery of Alford.
Language shifted underneath all of it. Gaelic gave way to Lowland Scots here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by 1792 only English was spoken in the parish, though the farm names stayed Gaelic. Our guide to Gaelic clans and surnames explains what that did to spellings, and Cairnie shows the process on another north-eastern place-name.
Three practical steps: search Cushney, Cushnie, Cushny, Cushnee and Cushley as one set; work backward from a statutory certificate, following our guide to Scotland's 1855 civil registration; and widen to Aberdeen city early, since a name this rare in the countryside surfaces in the burgh within a generation. Neighboring families are gathered in our survey of the clans of the north-east.
Own a Piece of Cushney Heritage
Donside weather may be what gave this name its meaning, and the range offers four ways to carry it: a mug, a garden flag, a framed ornament and a crest T-shirt. The tartan under the crest was picked for effect; no cloth was ever apportioned to Cushnie or Cushney. Our tartan guide covers who wears what.
Cushney Family Crest Framed Ornament
Frequently Asked Questions About the Cushney Name
Where does the surname Cushney come from?
From the lands and parish of Cushnie in the Alford district of Aberdeenshire, now Leochel-Cushnie. The name is Gaelic, though its exact meaning is disputed.
Are Cushney and Cushnie the same surname?
Yes, along with Cushny. Cushnie was much the commoner form in Scotland: 107 bearers in 1901 against five Cushneys.
Is Cushney a clan?
No chief of the name and no clan structure. The lands passed to the Leslies and then the Lumsdens, and the surname carried on without them.
Sources and Further Reading
- Leochel-Cushnie parish — the competing derivations and the shift from Gaelic to Doric.
- Cushnie Castle — the Cusnie holders, the Leslies, the Lumsdens.
- Canmore: Cushnie Castle — the site record and Cushnie Lodge of 1707.
- Aberdeenshire Historic Environment Record — the 1618 panel, the 1968 field visit.
- Oxford Dictionary of Family Names: Cushnie — the habitational derivation from Leochel.
- Cushney in the 1901 Scottish census — five bearers, mapped.
- Arthur Robertson Cushny — the Moray-born pharmacologist.
- FamilySearch: Leochel-Cushnie — the 1795 union, register start dates.
Cushney, Cushnie or Cushny, the designs run under the one spelling; 2,000-plus names sit in the search.