When kilted in a public and often crowded place I am quite frequently asked if I am scottish (and even Irish once), and I respond "No. I am American, but I have some scottish ancestry, and my surname is a derivation of a scottish family name", (albeit lowlander and actually Norman/Flemish in origin). I only discovered this after I extended the work of my uncle in chasing the geneology bunny down the rabbit's hole several years ago and since. I too am a "mutt" or mongrel, of mixed heritage from all over Europe depending on how far back you chase each particular line, which include more than a dozen other names of scottish derivation or origin, both highland and lowland alike. And like others here my patrilineal ancestry traces back at least 13 documented generations in America extending to before 1700. We have gone from immigrant tenant farmers to founding landowners of the great state of Virginia, lost that property to a combination of climatic and political events, migrated to the frontier hills of what are now West Virginia where most of those 13 generations lived hand to mouth existences in hillside cabins and small riverside whistlestop towns on the only railroad through the area, and in the coal towns that pervaded nearly every "holler" in that otherwise undeveloped part of the world. My family came out of the hills when my paternal grandfather and grandmother, the first high school graduates I have been able to document in the family, left the state for Chicago when my grandfather served in the Navy there during WWII, later returning to WV and raising the first college graduates documented in the family, my father and only one of his 4 younger siblings, both of whom also went on to graduate degrees and into the teaching profession. Of the offspring of my father's generation of siblings 10 of 11 completed college degrees, the 11th having recieved a full scholarship to a prestigious music school but dropped out only a couple unhappy years. In my own two elder children from my first marriage I see the "clogs to clogs" phenomenon that Jock speaks of, after each showed extremely advanced abilities early in their lives only to become average to slightly above or below average students at not prestigious or difficult colleges.

My "scottishness" is self defined, as, to the best of my knowledge and research, I am the only member of my american family to ever own, wear or even desire to wear a kilt, or for that matter any symbol of any of the myriad but distant heritages, and me only in the last 5 years after chasing my geneology extensively and discovering the remote (at least 20-22 generations remote) connection back to scotland, and several historical "family" castles and landholdings there. Even in Scotland, there were only a handfull or two generations there before my original Forrester progenitor is traced back to the Counts of Flanders and being a major player in the Norman Conquest of 1066 with William the Conqueror.

So not necessarily every third generation clog to clog, but from feudal lords in Flanders to a prominent landowning family in lowlands Scotland to less prominent gentlemen (assumption) in England to the New World as tenant farmers and then landowners and the, well, plain old hillfolk, to high school graduates to college graduates to honors student and professional degree and practice to average college students, we have pretty much been all over the scale from a degree of social and financial success standpoint. But we have not achieved our former social prominence of the days of Flanders or the south of Scotland/north of England, unless you want to count my recent "landed gentry-ship" achieved by the gifts of a few square feet of land in Scotland granting me the title of Laird of Dunans and Laird of Bandrum. A notch or two up from "clog", though, I guess.