Quote Originally Posted by Steve Ashton View Post
It seems that he was led to believe that his name alone 'entitled' him to wear this Tartan, to display a coat of arms, to go to Scotland and 'claim' title to a defunct castle, and even to claim a title of Laird.
For the last two, your customer was clearly being sold ownership in the Brooklyn Bridge. For the second item in your list, I'm not aware of the niceties regarding displaying a coat of arms. (My family claims none.) But as for wearing a tartan, there are no rules (unless your customer was looking at a restricted tartan like Balmoral). If I want to wear a MacPherson tartan, I have the right to. I have no (known) MacPherson ancestors. I have a friend who is a MacPhearson. In addition, I spent 30 minutes chatting with one of the MacPherson representatives in a bar before a recent Scottish festival. But there's not a "right" (or the lack thereof) to wear a tartan. If I spontaneously decide that I want to wear MacPherson, that's about all the right I need.

Steve,
While I agree that there's some shady "information" being sold, I'd prefer to make a distinction between the shady information, and the ability to wear one tartan or another.

I also agree that one should understand the difference between a clan and a clan society. However, if I decide to join the Clan Lamont society (the Browns are a sept of the Lamonts, and super8mm (one of the local Lamont reps) was a cool guy to chat with, even if there's no evidence that my ancestors were descended from the Brown sept of the Lamonts), under those circumstances, I'd feel a bit obliged to get a Lamont kilt. I would represent myself as a member of the clan society (which, based on dues payment, would be accurate), rather than as a member of the clan, which would be a dubious claim (since I genuinely don't know).

How many self-nominated kilt police are out there who would say that I wouldn't have the "right" to wear a clan tartan based on clan society membership?

We all have varying degrees of comfort with wearing a "clan" kilt. I fully encourage understanding one's relationship to a clan kilt. However, I'm in the camp that says one doesn't necessarily need to be limited in the tartan one chooses to wear. (I'm a bit more restrictive, but that's based on my preferences. Not some imaginary universal rule that I think others should follow.)