Also giving the fact that there are so few of us around, it would indicate that the original family hadn't been around in Scotland all that long, the evidence for this is in the old records themselves. From the late 1600s onwards you can trace the rise in numbers of Motions, and this is from only two adult males. If we had been around in Scotland much before the 1680s, then there should be more than 2 or 3 adults, but there are not.

Every single Motion whom I know & people who have Motion ancestry can trace their lineage back to either Johne Motion & Christian Traill or Thomas Motion & Janet Mitchell, in other words everybody can trace their ancestry back to the two original adult males from the late 1600s, this I feel is further proof that there was only one family around at this time.

NAME VARIATIONS

From time to time we have been recorded under other names, but these are quite clearly simple spelling mistakes, made by someone who was unfamiliar with the spelling of our name.

Some of these variants are as follows - MOSHON, MOSHUN, MOSHAN, MOSHIM & MOSHEIM and one or two others, now I don't know about you, but I have certainly had my name spelt by at least one of these variants from time to time and if this can happen in the year 2000 then just imagine what it would have been like 250+ years ago when the majority of the population couldn't read or write. These variants have quite simply been written down as they sounded to the person who recorded the event. Motion doesn't sound as if it has a T in the middle, it sounds like it has a SH in the middle, so you can forgive anybody who has made this mistake, because they are only writing down what they hear.

Every one of these variants is a spelling mistake apart from the last one, which is a proper name and has Germanic origins, indeed there is a town in Germany called Mosheim. There were only a few times that the name of Mosheim was used instead of Motion and for one person in particular it was clearly not a spelling mistake. Alexander Motion, the son of Robert Motion/Mary Halkerston was using the name of Mosheim as an alias back in the early 1800s, why I don't know, perhaps he thought that this was our original name and decided that he wished to be called by this name.

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