Which tartan for MacClive?

[Calgacus]

This is a handy website:-

http://forebears.co.uk/surnames

Enter your surname and do a search. Once the results come up, click on the spelling of interest and you get a distribution map showing where the name is common.

Adding to what Nathan said above, researching Scottish history is challenging and fun. There are personal politics and agendas in lots of it, and some of it is simply hardly researched at all, with myths and errors perpetuated because nobody has bothered to look properly. I discovered that whilst looking for the site of Mons Graupius and Ptolemy's Roman map of Scotland.

[Nathan]

This site is also helpful because it has surname variations. McCleave seems to be one.
http://robertson-gorrie.com/document...meVariants.pdf

Regarding your father's pride in being Scottish, there's nothing saying he wasn't Scottish. The question is simply whether his Gaelic speaking ancestors came from the Scottish Gaidhealtacht or crossed over from Northern Ireland. There are families with the same Gaelic name (Dunnshleibhe) in both countries. Also, it certainly doesn't make one less Scottish. If you trace it back, most of the famous Scottish families came to Scotland from somewhere else. There has also always been a steady stream of immigration from Ireland to different parts of Scotland. After a few generations they were indeed Scots, but their names remained Irish.

Interestingly, the Electric Scotland site that claims MacClave and MacCleave are associated with Galloway.

http://www.electricscotland.com/webclans/spellings.htm

http://www.scotclans.com/scottish_cl...y/history.html

http://houseoftartan.co.uk/scottish/searchsurname.asp

I'm just unsure about whether they are saying the Galloway district or clan. So if MacClive is a variation of those names, that seems to point there.

Again, rather than going with a maternal great grandfather, you can always wear the district tartan of Ayrshire where you know your father's family comes from. Galloway is adjacent to Ayrshire so there is a compelling case that we may be getting closer to your particular MacClives/MacClaves.