The Lobban One-Name Study as registered with the Guild in 2018, is a continuation by myself (Christopher Simon Lobban) of studies conducted in the 1980s by my late uncle Alan (Lobban) Rudge, in collaboration with Malcolm Lobban, who has a manuscript book The Scottish Surname Lobban; Sydney Lobban, who has accumulated some 35 descendants trees of Scottish Lobban or Loban families; and Stephanie Logan Falls, a leader of The Logan DNA Project, whose ancestors were Lobans, and who compiled a list of Lobban/Loban baptisms and marriages from Scotland’sPeople. See link below to article in Aberdeen & NE Scotland Family History Society Journal.

I have taken as my starting point Alan Rudge’s set of hypotheses about the origin of the name in North East Scotland, i.e., that (1) The Loban/Lobban families in NE Scotland (an area occupying parts of modern Banffshire, Morayshire and Aberdeenshire  -- see map) are a single genetic branch, (2) unrelated to the Lobans of Inverness, but (3) derived from a man from the Continent who arrived in Scotland about 1534 and “Scottished” his name to Loban. We are accumulating Y-DNA data to test these hypotheses, working with the R1b-U198 haplotype research group associated with Family Tree DNA. See Origin, below.

Website live at https://lobban.one-name.net/

The registered variant names are Loban,  Laban and Lobbin. We know that the Dutch Laban line originated from a Loban in the 1620’s. We know that the spellings of Loban and Lobban were used indiscriminately in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries and there were some other similar spellings before that. We also know that some Loban family names changed to Logan, Stephanie’s family being a case in point, and we suspect that this may have happened a number of times. Nevertheless, we are not researching Logan as a name; Stephanie is co-leader of a DNA Logan study group associated with Family Tree DNA, and they also maintain a Pre1800sLogans Yahoo Groups page. People interested in Logan should seek information there (link below).

Scottish legends suggest that the name Loban arose in the Inverness area in the 14^th C., near Drumderfit, and that these Lobans populated the Black Isle area. These are the people I have mentioned as Highland Lobans. 

We have confirmed that the NE Scotland Lobbans are one haplogroup, which includes a Dutch line with the name changed to Laban, and we found a "Lobban motif" in the STR data that allows us to see family connections back at least to Norman times, i.e., before surnames, and these branches of course have different surnames, including a line of Holmes. They are in Limb 7 of the Logan DNA Project, with "Germanic" ancestry, hypothetically Flemish.  The Highland Loban's modern descendants are all called Logan, as far as we can tell, and are related to the Loban/Logan line at Drumderfit. They are in Limb 3 of the Logan DNA Project with "Celtic" ancestry.  Details on the Lobban website.

There are scattered mentions of Loban in early records, and plenty of Church of Scotland baptism and marriage records, most concentrated in and around the old parish of Rothiemay. We also know that there were Catholic Lobban families, but these records have not been located.

(Source: http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org; data for UK)

The name is still found in Scotland and England. Descendants of emigrants from NE Scotland are found overseas in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several parts of the United States. A large number of Lobbans are found in Jamaica, these seem to be former slaves of two Lobbans who held plantations in the early 1800s; many of these slaves may simply have taken (or been given) the name of the master, but there may also be genetic links.

Although some websites marketing coats of arms declaim the Lobban name as being from Devon, England, and even that "the surname is still largely restricted to County Devon," the 1911 England Census and 1939 England Register show few Lobbans even living in Devon -- and several of those born in Scotland!  Similarly, no Devon Lobbans in maps generated by publicprofiler.org, cited above.

As of the beginning of the 20^th C., records showed the following interesting pattern of Lobban vs Loban:

• Scotland (1901 Census): 445 name Lobban, 16 name Loban
• England (1911 Census): 97 Lobban, 13  Loban; (1939 Register): 110 Lobban, 8 Loban
• Canada (1911 Census): 55 Lobban, 45  Loban
• U.S.A. (1910 Census): Online search returned 142 (no Loban), but some wild name transcriptions (even when set to “exact”) that would only be resolved with some family tree data to cross-check. There were descendants of NE Scotland families e.g., of Alexander Lobban (1784–1868) and Elizabeth Paterson (1786–1844) in Genessee County, MI (evident in 1910 Census); Alexander Lobban (1777-1872) and Margaret McAdam (1780-1846) who moved to McHenry County, Illinois. We also know that when Robert W. Lobban went to the US in 1893, his name was changed to Lobbin and his descendants are so named.
• Australia (Electoral Rolls 1903-1915): about 65 Lobban (hard to resolve all duplicates), 4 Loban

As noted under name variants, we know that the Laban family in The Netherlands descended from William Loban. One of these descendants, Jan Laban (1835–1921) and Francijna van Ijsseldijk (1832–1899), emigrated to the US in 1880. (However, Laban seems to be a name with multiple origins, the rest unrelated to the Scottish Lobban/Loban families.)

The DNA research, as noted above, is being carried out within the R1b-U198 haplotype group at Family Tree DNA. The terminal SNP of  the haplotype of the Lowland Lobban's  genetic branch is JFS0277; that of the Highland Lobans FT75933 (not part of U198, but thanks to John Sloan for helping us with this side anyway).

My Lobban study site is https://lobban.one-name.net/

My primary family tree is at https://www.ancestry.com

The ANESFHS article can be seen at https://www.anesfhs.org.uk/component/anesfhs/index.php?option=com_arismartbook&view=book&bookId=185#page/16

RootsWeb forum: http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php

Ancestry.com message boards for surname Lobban: https://www.ancestry.com/boards/surnames.lobban/mb.ashx

Pre1800s Logans group page: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Pre1800Logans/info