Please understand, I have no desire to hurt feelings or deprive anyone of fun and comradeship. After all "community" is where you find it, whether a public service organization, a good pub or a newly reinvented Clan.

I am relatively new to the forum but not wearing kilts. As a boy I wore one to kirk every Sunday and I was married in one thirty years ago. I was raised to be proud of my Scottish background but there was never any mention of our Clan. My paternal Grandparents emigrated from Scotland to Canada with five small children in 1919. I am fortunate that my Grandfather started a memoir that he was unable to finish but through it I know that his family was from a small village outside Inverness and had been for many, many generations. Theirs was a life of poverty in the extreme. In order to escape this and give his children a chance, his father moved the family to Glasgow and he got a backbreaking job in the shipyards there building the great steel ships which were the backbone of the Royal Navy. I am sure he did not want to go and leave his ancestral village, he had no choice, no kindly Chief to turn to, no great family to support him. In time my Grandfather followed his father into the shipyards until they closed after the demand for battleships for the Great War was over. He found himself completely without work with five small children. Where was "The Clan", where was the Chief? He made the hardest decision of his life and bought passage to Canada.

Fortunately, the second chapter of his life was much kinder to him and he was successful and happy in Canada. In fact upon his retirement all us Grandchildren bought him a ticket to go back to Scotland, something he had never done since leaving. He declined to go, saying he was proud to be a Scot but that Canada was his home now and he had no desire to go back.

I know many of us on this side of the pond are not so fortunate as I to actually remember and have talked with their Scottish immigrant ancestor. However, I am willing to bet most of your family stories are similar to my own. Your families did not leave Scotland because they wanted to. They left because of cruel unrelenting poverty. There was no "Chief" to turn to for help, in fact he may have been a big part of the problem in his efforts to clear his land from the hundreds, even thousands, of unproductive crofters who stood in the way of sheep, shooting and progress.

I am proud of my Scottish roots, I am proud to wear the kilt but I have no desire sign back into a Clan system which so clearly failed and abandoned my family only a couple of generations ago.

I am interested in your opinions. Am I unnecessarily cynical? Should I be more open to the modern Clan organizations? What are your family stories? Do any of you have examples of where the Clan helped your ancestors?