When William Duff was made Earl Fife in 1759, the patent gave him a second title, Viscount Macduff, and with it a claim to the medieval Earls of Fife that his family asserted and never proved. That gap runs through everything else about this name, and the honest version is better than the pedigree.
The Duffs were not an ancient house restored. They were merchants who bought their way into the north of Scotland, then went looking for ancestors.
What Does Duff Mean?
Dark, or black. The root is Gaelic dubh, used both as a nickname for a dark-haired man and as a personal name in its own right.
That word sits under a whole family of Gaelic names on both sides of the Irish Sea. In Ireland it produced Ó Duibh, Mac Duibh and Mac Giolla Duibh, along with Ó Dubhthaigh, the source of Duffy, and it sits inside Ó Dubhghaill, behind Doyle. In Scotland it produced nicknames that hardened into surnames, the mechanism behind the Black surname.
Duff is a color word that became a name several times over, in several places. Two families called Duff need share nothing but a description of somebody's hair.
Are the Duffs Descended from the MacDuff Earls of Fife?
Nobody has shown it, and those best placed to know have said so for a century.
Start with what the MacDuffs were. The early chiefs were the Earls of Fife, holding the right to enthrone the king at Scone and the privilege called the Law of Clan MacDuff, under which a killer within the ninth degree of kinship to the earl could claim sanctuary at the Cross of MacDuff near Abernethy and buy remission. Duncan, the last of the line to matter, died a prisoner in Kildrummy Castle in 1336, and the earldom passed to the Duke of Albany. Our history of Clan MacDuff follows that line.
Now the gap. The Duffs of Braco appear in Banffshire and Moray, three centuries and the width of Scotland from Duncan's death, with a documented pedigree beginning not with an earl but with Adam Duff of Clunybeg in the early seventeenth century. Peerage reference works put it plainly: the family asserted, but did not prove, descent from Macduff. Reviewing the Taylers' Book of the Duffs in 1914, a critic granted only that it was not impossible.
Not impossible is a long way from documented. Treat it as family tradition, which is what it has always been. What the Duffs did is the better story.
How Did the Duffs Get So Rich?
By trade and by mortgage, almost unheard of among Scottish landed families.
Most great houses rose through war, royal service or the law. The Duffs rose through retail trade and land speculation. Alexander Duff of Braco, 1652 to 1705, lent money on mortgage to neighbors who could not repay, foreclosed when they defaulted, and turned each failure into another Duff estate. His brother William of Dipple worked the same way, and between them they assembled a landholding across Banffshire and Moray that no ancestry could have bought.
Dipple's son, another William, inherited in 1722, sat for Banffshire from 1727 to 1734, and was created Lord Braco in 1735 and Earl Fife and Viscount Macduff in 1759. The earldom sat in the Irish peerage, a common device, and later Duffs collected British titles that carried a seat in the Lords. This was Gordon and Innes country, mapped in our accounts of Clan Gordon, Clan Innes and the north east.
What Went Wrong at Duff House?
Everything.
In 1735 Lord Braco commissioned William Adam, the leading Scottish architect of the day, to build a baroque mansion outside Banff. Adam acted as both architect and contractor, there was no formal contract, and the two fell out over the cost of the carved stonework. Adam sued for £5,796 12s 11⅓d and won at first instance, but Braco dragged the proceedings out for years, and they were settled only shortly before Adam's death in 1748.
The consequences are visible from the road. The flanking pavilions and quadrant colonnades in Adam's design were never built, so the house stands as a tall, ornate block with nothing to either side, and Braco never occupied or fitted it out. The story that he drew his carriage blinds rather than look at the place is the kind such a quarrel generates and the kind that cannot be checked.
The Dukes of Fife moved out in 1903 and gave the house to Banff and Macduff in 1906. It served as a hotel, a sanatorium and a wartime military site, took bomb damage in 1940 that killed eight people, and reopened in 1995 as a gallery hanging works from the national collection.
Why Is There a Town Called Macduff?
Because the 2nd Earl decided so.
The fishing settlement across the Deveron from Banff was Doune. William Duff bought it in 1733; his son James, the 2nd Earl Fife, built the harbor in 1760, brought in tradesmen, laid out roads and a bridge, and in 1783 took a burgh of barony charter and renamed the place Macduff, after the ancestor the family claimed.
James was a serious improver as well as a self-mythologizer. He wrote that when he began there was not a tree in the valley and it was believed none would grow so near the coast; over thirty years he planted some 7,000 acres and proved the point. A man who plants a forest and names a town after an undocumented ancestor is doing two things, and only one is doubtful.
How Did the Earls Fife Become Dukes?
By marrying the future king's daughter.
Alexander William George Duff, 6th Earl Fife, married Princess Louise, eldest daughter of the future Edward VII, on 27 July 1889. Queen Victoria made him Duke of Fife and Marquess of Macduff the same day. In 1900 a fresh patent created the dukedom again with special remainder to his daughters by Louise and their heirs male, an unusual provision that saved the title: he had no surviving son, and his elder daughter Princess Alexandra succeeded him.
He died at Aswan in Egypt on 29 January 1912, having survived the wreck of the liner Delhi the previous December. His estate was valued near a million pounds and he held some 249,000 acres. The 1759 earldom died with him; the dukedom continues, which puts the Duffs among the names in our guide to Scottish families with royal ties.
Where Do the Duff-Gordons Fit?
A separate line, joined by inheritance, not blood.
The baronetcy was created on 12 November 1813 for James Duff, British consul at Cádiz, with remainder to his nephew William Gordon. Duff died unmarried in 1815, Gordon succeeded and took the additional surname Duff, and the hyphenated name has run ever since.
Two bearers are remembered. Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon, 1821 to 1869, went to Egypt for her health in 1862, settled at Luxor, learned Arabic and wrote Letters from Egypt, three editions in its first year. Two generations later another Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, became a leading couturier; she and Sir Cosmo survived the Titanic and spent years answering for how.
Is There a Clan Duff?
Not in the formal sense, and it is worth being straight about.
There is no chief of the name Duff recognized by the Court of the Lord Lyon, and Duff does not appear as a clan in the standard list. MacDuff does, listed as armigerous: a name group that once had a chief bearing undifferenced arms but has none currently recognized. The Lord Lyon's own position is blunter, that arms belong to people and not to clans.
None of which stops Duff being a substantial surname. The 1901 census of Scotland recorded 4,480 Duffs, ranking the name 174th. It is landed and mercantile history rather than clan history, a distinction our comparison of Highland and Lowland clan structures works through.
Which Duffs Are Not This Family?
Most, statistically.
Irish Duffs are usually anglicizations of Ó Duibh, Mac Duibh or Mac Giolla Duibh, with no connection to Banffshire. Duffy is a separate Irish name from Ó Dubhthaigh. Duffus is a Moray place-name with its own castle, and Duffield is English. A Duff in Fife may descend from a MacDuff sept; a Duff in Aberdeen more likely descends from a tenant who took the landlord's name, which was ordinary practice. Our survey of the clans of Fife covers the eastern side.
How Do You Trace a Duff Family?
- Fix the region first. Banffshire and Moray point to the Braco orbit; Fife and Perthshire to MacDuff country; Ireland and Ulster somewhere else entirely.
- Search Duff and Duffe together, and keep Duffy, Duffus and Duffield in separate searches until you have a reason to merge them.
- Use estate papers, not just registers. Tenants appear in rentals, tacks and factors' accounts that never reached a parish book.
- Begin from a statutory certificate after 1855, following our guide to Scotland's civil registration, then work back into the Old Parish Registers of Banff, Grange, Mortlach and Boharm.
- Resist the pedigree. If a published tree runs your line back to Macduff, Thane of Fife, find where it stops citing documents; our surname guide explains why that matters.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Duff Name
What does the surname Duff mean?
Dark or black, from Gaelic dubh, used both as a nickname for a dark-haired man and as a personal name. The same root sits behind several Irish surnames.
Are the Duffs really descended from Macduff, Earl of Fife?
It has never been proved. Peerage reference works record that the family asserted the descent without demonstrating it, and the documented pedigree begins with Adam Duff of Clunybeg in the seventeenth century.
Is Duff the same name as Duffy?
No. Duffy is Irish, from Ó Dubhthaigh. They share the element dubh and nothing else, and merging them in a search will cost you time.
Are there still Dukes of Fife?
Yes. The earldom of 1759 died with the 1st Duke in 1912, but the 1900 dukedom passed through his daughter under a special remainder and continues.
Sources and Further Reading
- Earl Fife — the 1759 creation, and the descent from Macduff asserted but not proved.
- Clan MacDuff — the medieval Earls of Fife and Duncan's death in 1336.
- "The Duff Family", The Spectator, 21 March 1914 — a review of the Taylers' Book of the Duffs, on the mortgages, the foreclosures and the unproved descent.
- Duff House — the 1735 commission, the missing pavilions, the 1906 gift.
- William Adam — the sum sued for, and how long Braco spun the case out.
- Macduff, Aberdeenshire — Doune renamed in 1783 after a supposed ancestor.
- Banff and Macduff Heritage Trail — Alexander Duff of Braco, the harbor and the 7,000 acres of planting.
- Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife — the 1889 marriage and the 1900 special remainder.
- Duff-Gordon baronets — the 1813 creation, Lucie and Lucy.
- List of Scottish clans — MacDuff armigerous, Duff not listed.
- Duff in the 1901 Scottish census — 4,480 bearers, ranked 174th, mapped.
- Duff in the Dictionary of American Family Names — Gaelic dubh, nickname and personal name.
- George F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland — the standard reference for early forms.
- ScotlandsPeople — Banffshire and Moray registers and censuses.
Explore our Duff Scottish family gifts to find keepsakes featuring the family name.