When did your Clans and Scottish heritage start, when did you first wear the kilt.

[grizzbass]

The mormon church is very big on genealogy so we have always know our heritage which left Scotland in the mid 1800 to come to Utah. Both sides on my side had Scottish roots as well as Scandinavian English and Swiss.(we still apparently have cousins living in the Chalet built in the the early 1800s) We never really did celebrate it though.
I attended a scottish festival in Tulsa back in the 1990's and quite enjoyed it but we moved to a small Idaho town and it was put on the backburner.
When we moved to California we started attending the festivals and the kids started participating in the games. First kilt was McKenzie and then Anderson. My wife's side goes through MacArthur and Jardine.
I do know a little about schools breaking people's natural nature. In kindergarten and the lower grades when we lived in Nebraska they broke me from being left handed. It did effect me in a weird way. For years I switched tenses. I'd say go for went and went for go etc.

[Patty Logan]

For me it started when i was a 13, all my school friends were joining cadets.(the military's version of scouts, for all you people who dont live in a Commonwealth Country) when i was there i saw that there was a group of people my age wearing skirts or kilts playing a weird octopus looking instrument. being a person who like to push boundaries especially when it come to the dress regulations i decided to join. It was perfect timing because the majority of the group was leaving do to being to "old" for the program and in order to get funding from are sponsor the local R.C.A.F ( royal canadian air force) pipe band we had to have a full band. (one snare, one base, one piper, and one tenor drummer) from that moment on I when to play with several bands at several highland games in my area, that made me realize that the kilt is not just a band uniform, its part of a cultural identity. So looked up my family tree, found out I have scottish ancestors and the rest is history!

[LANCER1562]

I had always had a passing interest interest in my Scottish heritage when my dad would jokingly refer to himself as being all Scotch with a little bit of water. I didn't realize at the time that it was because he was a heavy drinker. When I would go to parades and see the pipe bands, something would stir in me. I have always liked the sound of the pipes. When my mom died in 2003, she left me a rather large sum of money and instructions to buy something that made me happy. So I bought a made to measure kilt in the Kerr Modern tartan and several bagpipe CDs much to my then wife's chagrin. Over the years I have purchased more kilts and attended Highland games.

[MacDonald of Glencoe]

This was the early 60s that this was still happening Patty1059, the unsteady erosion of The Gaelic language and Culture had been going on since Culloden, then it was kept going through The Highland Clearances to the Eduction act of 1871 in Scotland that put Gaelic as a language not to be used in Schools, to destroy a Culture you must first destroy its lanquage, they almost did it.
It was the same over most of The Highlands, some stricter than others. In the Islands where Gaelic was mostly still spoken some Schools did do some Gaelic and allow it but they weren't supposed to.
I have a video on another of my posts called The Gaelic Labquage that shows what was happening to Gaelic and the Culture in Skye, it is very similar to where I am from.
This is what is great about American Scots, they know their heritage and history very early, we were denied it.

California Highlander, Its great that you knew your own ancestry, and From Wick in Caithness, I am from Canisbay in Caithness not that far from it. I know people with those names you mentioned, what was your Grandmothers name, you should still have relatives here.

Grizzbass, Again like other American Scots you knew about your Culture early. They tried that here about using the left hand, most kept using it and they didn't try again after that.


Lancer1562, You also like other American Scots knew your Culture and history early, it's great that it stirred you and you participate in it.
Have you seen this,


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J_KfeKhXEI0&t=5s

This should stir you up.

[Holcombe Thomas]

Like a number of others posting, I knew of my Scottish ancestry early on. I am not sure of a time when I did not know. (Southern Americans and genealogy.) My grandmother subscribed to "Scottish Field" magazine and passed her copies on to me when I was something like 11 or 12. I read it now.

I started wearing the kilt 18 or 19 years ago.

Holcombe

[OC Richard]

About the Scottish Cringe, one thing that's nice to see is Scottish actors and Scottish accents becoming seen and heard more in the worldwide media.

Sean Connery was dismissed by the English powers-that-be in the London film industry as being

"too tall, too dark, and too Scottish"

and when he won the role of James Bond he had to create the hybrid accent that he's used ever since.

The London film industry is full of Scottish actors who have had to adopt English accents to work, as recently as David Tennant (Dr Who), several of the Games Of Thrones cast, and Martin Compson (Line Of Duty).

The first step is allowing Scottish actors to use their own accents in English shows, as David Tennant did in Broadchurch.

It seems that finally here in the USA we're getting quality TV programmes filmed in Scotland with Scottish casts using their own accents such as Outlander, The Nest, The Loch, and Deadwater Fell. Practically every TV programme my wife and I have been watching features Scottish actors and/or is set in Scotland with a Scottish cast.

About my own ancestry, as you've seen genealogy is huge here in the USA. Many US families have a family story, a family Origin Myth as it were, and online databases and DNA testing have fed our fascination with where we come from.

I was raised not knowing much about our family history. My father tried to pass what he knew on to me, but I was a stupid kid and didn't pay attention. It's taken me decades of research to piece together all the stuff he knew! (He passed away when I was in my 20s.)

Now I know much, and just last month my son and I travelled the old stomping grounds in West Virginia, the epicentre of the Cooks, where we've been since the 18th century. A man in the first Cook generation born in America intermarried with a Stewart woman in the first generation to be born in America (the four parents of this couple were born in Scotland, Scotland, Ulster, and England) and the Cooks and the Stewarts continue to intermarry to this day, there in southwest West Virginia.

I've only found out the Stewart connection recently. I think my father always knew about it!

About wearing the kilt, that came not from knowing about any Scottish ancestry but because at the age of 17 I took up playing the pipes.

My grandmother made my first two kilts.

Here's the first photo of me piping. I'm wearing my first kilt, that my grandmother made from ordinary plaid wool I found at a local fabric shop. This would have been 1975.



Here by 1977 I had acquired more kit! I won an art contest and spent the prize money on a feather bonnet. The sporran was an old one I bought for $15 and restored. This is the second kilt my grandmother made for me, from real Scottish tartan, in Macdonald Of the Isles Hunting. I made the doublet and plaid myself.

[EagleJCS]

Growing up, I didn’t know much about my heritage on either side of the family. We didn’t really celebrate any cultural/ethnic heritage stuff because “We’re Americans”. For my father's family's part, it was a subject that was ‘not to be discussed’ – I found out why just a few years ago, and it was something Dad didn’t really know about either. His father didn’t discuss it. I’m going to leave it at that. When I was around 11-12 years old, Mom got a packet from a distant cousin which shared several generations of her father’s family history, largely German, which Mom never knew about being 4th generation American and her father having passed when she was still young. That sparked an interest in me to find out more, for both sides, but I didn’t really have much of an opportunity back then.

At around the same age, I developed an interest in bagpipes and decided I wanted to learn how to play them. Fast forward about 15 or so years. I found a piping instructor which eventually led to my finding out about Clan Scott (my surname), which I had never heard of. I was told then that even though there are Irish and English Scott’s in addition to the Scottish Scott’s, all are welcome to join the Clan Scott Society. That led to a drive to investigate my paternal line to find out our origins and if I could find where we came from and when.

With the help of the internet, I came across a cousin’s published research into our family (my grandfather’s cousin’s son, my second cousin once removed). I contacted him to correct what he had published about my branch, which he thanked me for, but he hasn't stayed in touch to share anything further. I have yet to be able to trace my paternal line myself far enough back to make the connection across the Atlantic, though one of the wives’ family (Prees/Preece/Price/Priest) goes back to Wales. His research goes back to about 1774 or so, still here in North America. As far as I know, that’s our “brick wall” for published records.

I do know now that I am basically an ‘American mutt’ – I have direct ancestors from several places in Western Europe. Wales, Ireland (my ggm, the most recent immigrant on my tree, came over at age 11 with her family in 1903), Germany (lots on both sides, mostly from the Rhine valley in the mid-1800’s), England, Luxembourg, Belgium. If you wanted to put a ratio to it, my ancestry is probably more German than anything, but all of the lines have been here in the US for well over 100 years now, so we're American.

[Pleater]

My fathers mother's family were Wilsons, small time farmers, farm labourers and engineers most likely displaced by sheep and came South looking for land to rent and work.

They tended to the upkeep of steam engines, both static and mobile, and that is possibly how my father's parents encountered each other, as there was a saw mill steam engine minder on my dad's dad's side.

When everything went somewhat awry in the family fortunes, and Granddad lost the lot, the family rallied around to some extent and when I went to a new school and needed non uniform clothes a couple of kilts materialised. Being branded posh and toffee nosed I learned how to punch and block - there was red in my hair in those days, and I did not back down. There were ambulances several times. Fortunately I got into cricket, and changed school, but there was still the DNA of a Viking berserker and bodyline bowling sometimes got me into trouble.

When I left school the kilts got shorter, teamed with platform soled boots I was about 6ft tall and acted as backup bouncer and roadie for a folk duo/trio/going solo, depending on who had fallen out with who that week. I used a 650cc BSA motorbike with double adult Watsonian side car to shift the gear. There wasn't much money in that in the winter so I concentrated on making things to sell, caps, waistcoats and the like. In the summer I went sailing in the Solent and played my guitar at various spots along the coast. I still have a good number of Scottish songs and tunes in my repertoire, and play for dancing, but there is still no money in it.

I do have some uncommon skills, such as the distillation of alcohol, a good knowledge of herbs both culinary and medicinal, and I can spin, weave, knit and knot, I know how to make a fair few garments in linen and cotton fabric, I learned a bit of spoken Welsh but can neither read nor write it.

I can't run up mountains these days, and I usually stay out of trouble, I always wear kilts and other garments of my own making, but I still don't back down.

Anne the Pleater.

[Crazy Dave]

I had google "toffee nosed", which refers to the toffee colored drip from snuff, which was popular with the well off. Learned a new phrase!

I've had my fair share of scraps. The first nose break I had was in junior high school and I don't know how many times it was broken since. I was a kickboxer in the 80's. Considering my experience, I was wondering, How do you fight in platform shoes?

Dave

[Pleater]

I've had my fair share of scraps. The first nose break I had was in junior high school and I don't know how many times it was broken since. I was a kickboxer in the 80's. Considering my experience, I was wondering, How do you fight in platform shoes?
Dave

Very well, apparently. I got complaints.

Anne the Pleater