Personal names appear in almost all texts about early medieval Insular societies, but it is more common to study the people behind the names or consider individual names on a case-by-case basis than to consider naming practices more broadly. For early medieval Scotland, we have literary sources such as saints’ Lives and poetry, and histories, most notably Bede's ‘Ecclesiastical History’, but these do not provide names covering the whole period. The genealogies of important kindreds of the Gaelic world provide a massive corpus of names, with an often impressive degree of coverage for Ireland, less for Scotland, and evidence for relationships between people. However, as these genealogies do not survive in early medieval manuscripts, they were also subject to later manipulation and fabrication. In addition, they have a major drawback: the genealogical genre tries to provide every generation of a person's ancestry, so they tend to state that individuals were the sons or fathers of others, usually either in the form ‘X son of Y son of Z’, or ‘these are the sons of X, that is Y and Z’. As a result, apart from an individual's own first name, these sources do not allow us to understand well how people were actually called by contemporaries. In medieval societies, where ancestry was significant, people could be identified not only by their parentage, but also by their grandparents or other ancestors, their kindred, or by a place, practices hidden by the form of the genealogical genre.

Such practices are, however, visible in the Gaelic chronicles, which contain the names of hundreds of individuals each century, with names comprising a substantial proportion of these texts overall. While the form of the personal names is affected by the nature of the event and how the annalist wanted to present it, as well as the overall tendency towards brevity in this genre, the chronicles display considerable variety in the form of personal names. The result is that these chronicles are major sources for personal names and naming practices in Scotland and Ireland in the period before A.D. 1100, before the growth of administrative documents, such as charters, produces a transformation in the evidence available for study.