Is there any universal rule for
the alphabetizing of names starting
with Mc & Mac (McDonald MacDougall)?
I have noticed that the reference
books I have seem to do it too many
different ways. Marquis' Who's Who
places Mc names after all the names
starting with Ma (in what I term as
"natural" alphabetic order). Harper's
Encyclopedia of Military Biography
treats names beginning with Mc as if they
were actually spelled "Mac", and places
them in the Ma names. Still others do
the same, but place ALL Mc & Mac names
before all other names starting with M.

Prefixes are considered to be part of the name itself and are treated the same as any other spelling. So when filing, Mac will always come before Mc.

If you want to see some rules of alphabetizing.....visit this site:
Indexing and alphabetizing procedures

BellSouth uses the traditional form of alphabitizing. We would print MacDonald before McDonald...
MA comes before MC...even if MC was an abbreviated form of MAC - it still would be placed alphabetical with the rest of the MCs.

A long time ago, I had to take telephone directory data from a mainframe computer, where it was stored as ALL CAPS, convert to upper and lower case and sort into alphabetical order for a typeset directory. The rule I was given (by British Telecom) was that ‘Mc’ sorted as if it were spelled ‘Mac’, and that ‘St’ sorted as ‘Saint’.

The sorting wasn’t hard. I just set up an extra sort field with the abbreviations spelled out. The problems came with the capitalisation. I had to do something special for McDonald and MacDonald, as well as O’Brien, LeClerk, and others of that ilk. Everything looked great, until someone pointed out that I’d invented a brand-new Scottish clan – the MacHines (several entries under ‘Machine Tool Company’ )

Thanks for all the feedback ! It
is greatly appreciated !