Your Kilted Grandfathers (or Other Grandfather Influences)

[ohiopiper]

I consider myself very lucky to have known all my grandparents and three of the four are still alive. I even had a great grandmother alive until last winter.

From my maternal grandfather, I learned to work with my hands. He is and remains someone who amazes me with the broad reach of his talents. Carpentry, plumbing, minor electrical, etc. There's about nothing around the house (his and mine) that he can't formulate a plan to address or improve. Even in his early seventies, he just enclosed his carport to make an attached garage so my grandmother doesn't have to be exposed to the elements getting in and out of the car. For twenty years, he was the plant manager where I currently (and for the last seventeen years) work. He retired ten years ago and that gives him more time for projects!

From my paternal grandfather, I got a love of reading and learning. Not always the dry and dusty facts and figures of academia, but many things from out-of-the-way sources. Classic literature was a second love to him, closely behind my grandmother. When he passed, my grandmother began doling out his library to me in small doses at Christmas and Easter. I am blessed to have a well stocked set of bookshelves, more in boxes and memories of a loving man who appreciated them and taught me to do the same.

While none of this relates to kilt wearing (maternally english and paternally german) they all taught me to be my own man and comfortable in my own skin. When it came time to wear the kilt, there wasn't much self-doubt about it, thanks to the influence of my grandparents. In fact, all my grandparents enjoy the bagpipe and accept the kilt as a part of it. Even when I don't actually have a set of pipes with me at the moment!

[EagleJCS]

I never knew my maternal grandfather - he died of a massive MI when Mom was eight, just a week and a half before Christmas. From what Mom tells me, he was an electrician/mechanic.

My paternal grandfather was always smartly dressed, even when dressed for yard work. He was never very forthcoming on family history (he may not have known much beyond his parents), and I found out later why he didn't encourage very many questions. I still don't know the whole story, but I'm not relating more than that for now. From what my mother has told me, when asked he always said we - i.e. the Scott family - were 'Scotch-Irish' (today that's Scots-Irish, Scotch being an adult beverage). I found out a few years ago that his mother was from Country Antrim (specifically Toome - noted on the Ellis Island records as Toomebridge) in what is today Northern Ireland.

I was just getting to the point of being comfortable around him (Dad's parents were always on the formal side - the "children should be seen, not heard" types) when he passed away when I was 16.

As far as I know, I'm the first in my paternal line in at least 8 generations to wear tartan, much less a kilt. I'm the seventh generation to be born in Kentucky (starting in 1801).

[Steve of Lansing]

That counts. Do you cary one in your sporran?

Yep, Always. Currently it's just a little 3" liner lock Gerber. But that same Grandad gave me a 2 1/2" 2 blade folding toothpick that I still have and carry on the rare occasion I have to wear dress pants.

I also have a 3 1/3" Gerber liner lock in my EDC bag, and one of those weird little Buck liner lock knife/bottle opener/key fob things on my keyring. Those 2 go with me every day to work.

[Brett]

On the far left is my great grandfather Muirhead. He's not exactly kilted but I believe he often was as he spent the majority of his life in the Black Watch, partly in Scotland and partly in Montreal Canada. I believe this picture was taken in South Africa during the Boer War, although I'm not 100% sure. I have all his medals from both the Boer war and WW1. He died long before I was born, but I heard many interesting stories about him from my Grandmother.

[Riverkilt]

My grandfather was the stereotypical "taciturn Scot." He knew and passed on the family history - moving from Skye to Cape Breton Island in the 1800s. He researched the family information he didn't know by writing relatives and asking questions. The responses are pure gold and filled out the family tree.

He never wore or owned a kilt, that I know of. He did have a house full of Macdonald tartan goods though. Blankets, throws, a bathrobe, pajamas, and a few books on clans and tartans.

When I was young he took me to the highland games in Portland, Oregon frequently. So being of Scottish blood, and Clan Donald was deeply instilled in me - and the family history was passed on.

When I was older and researching the family history myself he wrote me with his memories of his relatives. My favorite was his recollections of an extended visit to his grandmother on Cape Breton Island when he was a boy. She spoke only Gaelic.

Though he didn't wear kilts he did wear flatcaps - perhaps because he was bald as a que ball.



This pic is from 1914 when he was a young man and had just become a father himself.

[Peter Crowe]

My paternal grandfather (Grandpa) was English (although his maternal grandfather was a Scot, he married a Scot my granny, and settled in Scotland). He was born in Aldershot in 1906 and grew up in the Poole/Bournemouth area on the Dorset-Hampshire county line. He ran away from home and enlisted in the East Surreys in 1926. He rose through the ranks to become RSM warder at Barlinnie Prison's military wing before OCTU and a commission in the Royal Engineers (1943). He retired from the Regular Army as a Captain in 1953. He had a wooden yacht for many years on Loch Lomond. Nicknamed 'The Colonel' by my granny's younger brother, he was an exceptionally well dressed man all his life, but never wore the kilt. He mostly wore Cavalry twill trousers. polished shoes (oxfords or brogues), tweed sports jacket, and informally a fine polo necked sweater otherwise a collar and conservative tie. Clean shaven with short neat brilliant white hair with a side parting. He always seemed very venerable, patriarchal and proper although he had a dry sense of humor. He sometimes wore a trilby outdoors but detested men wearing hats indoors (with the obvious exceptions of appropriate military protocol, i.e. parading indoors/religious observance). He died a few weeks short of his 81st birthday in 1986 when I was 20. He spoke Received Pronunciation/Southern Standard English without either the affected plummy speech of old-style Army Officers or the modern tendency to adopt an estuarine (Thames Estuary) accent.

My maternal grandfather (Papa) was a Scottish Borderer from Galashiels who had serious lifelong chronic health problems. He was born in 1913 and died when I was an infant in 1968. He looked like me and my mother and (like me, not my mother) had a receding hair line. He dressed a bit like Churchill whom he resembled more than a little (unlike me, as he was short and stocky) in dark suits and with a Black homburg or in tweeds. He occasionally wore tweed THCD with a Gunn kilt. As a young man he had been a Lieutenant in the Boys Brigade and was a Home Guard (KOSB badged) private during the war (he attempted to volunteer for active service but was rejected on medical grounds). My Papa had a very earthy but innocent (by today's standards) sense of humor. I can't remember his speech but have been told it was Scottish English/Scots in the accent and dialect of Galashiels.

Both my grandfathers were considered to be gentlemen although from modest family backgrounds, were active freemasons and good men by any standard. I have been very influenced by both of them in different ways as much as by my own father. ith:

[pei Mac Donald]

my grand uncle was my influence for being kilted he passed on our family tree to me for as long as i could remember. The day he showed me his rcaf (royal Canadian air force ) pipe band photo i knew i wanted to wear the kilt. When he told me that the black watch tartan is similar to the Campbell tartan (the tartan of my great grandmother) black watch it was and now black wach it is ( until i get a MacDonald of clanrandall kilt).

[Nighthawk]

My grandfather was a wisea**ed old Irishman. He was also every inch the country gentleman. He was always dressed in a very elegant manner. I can't walk into a building without hearing him in the back of my mind reminding me to remove my hat, because a man with good manners never wears a hat indoors. See the Rules Of The Gentleman thread here This was my grandfather, and I in my latest decade of life have taken his attitude to heart:



#8 is one of the ones that stands out most in my mind... Grandpa never started anything and just about everyone who knew him loved him, but I can't imagine being on the wrong side of those rock-hard fists...

[Tartan Hiker]

At the age of 9 my paternal great-grandfather and his twin brother were put on the boat to America by their Scots parents because, as the youngest of many children, they were two mouths that the family could not afford to feed. They landed in New York, and then made their way, unescorted, to relatives in Macon, Georgia, where the twin promptly died.

That journey fascinated my grandfather, who was a very practical, talented, but not wealthy man. Mustered into the US Army for WWI, his goal was to find time while overseas to locate and visit the family in Scotland. Alas, he came down with TB just before being shipped out and spent the next 8 years in a Veterans hospital here in North Carolina (oddly enough, the building where he lived is less than a mile from where I now sit). His health and finances were such that he was never able to make the trip to the "homeland.

In 1938 my father, tired of life on the farm, lied about his age and joined the Army. As it became more certain that he would end up in a tour of Europe (as the commander of an artillary unit he landed in Normandy on D-Day +2) my grandfather made him promise that when the shooting stopped he must find a way to get up to Scotland and try to locate the family. He tried, but in the aftermath of the war traveling to Scotland was just not to be.

So as a young lad I heard both my father and my grandfather telling and retelling the stories of strife, immigration, and the long-standing desire to visit the soil from which my family sprung. I vowed that I would make the trip someday.

The dream could have died right there if it had not been for that fateful day when my firstborn son, at the age of 5, stood with me watching a pipe and drum band march by in a Fourth of July parade. He looked up at me and said in a very serious tone, "Dad, I want to learn how to play the bagpipes." Long story short...by the age of 15 he was a uniformed member of that same pipe band and a very accomplished piper. In the meantime his grandfather had died, and I had discovered this forum and begun my own journey to learn more about my heritage, including, of course, the kilt.

Of course, my son had grown up hearing me and his grandfather telling the family story, and started agitating for a trip to Scotland. We began saving and scrimping and finally, back in 2006, my wife and I packed up the boys and traveled "across the pond" for a week of touring Scotland. Among other great destinations we did manage to get to the town where my great-grandfather was born. I wore my father's and grandfather's dogtags throughout the trip.

[Brett]

Tartan Hiker..... very interesting story, thanks for sharing. It's great to hear that you and your son were able to finally make the trip your father and grandfather were not able to make.