McGehee
An Irish and Scottish-style surname built from a Gaelic personal name, best known in the U.S. in this anglicized Mc- form.
The #5,984 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 53,704 Americans shares it.
Etymology
McGehee is an anglicized surname built on Gaelic Mac, meaning "son of," plus a personal-name element that has been rendered in English in several ways. In most cases it is treated as a surname of Gaelic patronymic origin, but the exact underlying Gaelic given name is not always certain because spellings varied widely when names were written down in English. The McGehee spelling reflects a phonetic Anglicization rather than a literal English word meaning.
History
The name is found chiefly in the United States, especially in families of Scots-Irish or Irish descent whose surnames were adapted in English-speaking records. Like many Mc- surnames, it stabilized in several regional spellings as clerks wrote the name by sound. The McGehee form became established in American records even where older Gaelic forms may have been different.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
The same Gaelic prefix Mac can produce a wide range of modern spellings, so surnames that look unrelated on paper are often distant cousins.