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

[gun eagal]

When I was nine or ten my parents took me to see the Royal Highland Fusiliers. They bought me the record and I wore it out, playing it every day, over and over. My dad traded a rowboat for a set of bagpipes that belonged to a man on the island. There were a couple of pipers on the island at that time, so I started taking lessons from a man who had been taught by Bruce Gandy's father in British Columbia.
Then came the "problem" of trying to discover my Scottish heritage. Great grandparents on both sides of my family came from Ireland, one from Clare and the other from Belfast. My surname comes from French Normans who settled in Devonshire, not Irish. My first time playing at a funeral was for a Seaforth Highlander who had fought in WWI. I was thirteen, I think. They put a red flag over his coffin, not the maple leaf flag. Modern genealogy research turned up Scotts and Hutchins, but primarily my Scottish identity comes from the community of pipe bands and a life long fascination with Scottish history and literature, and, of course, pipe music.
Now I identify with my Scottish friends and the communities that I feel attached to, South Uist, Moidart, Edinburgh. I once met an American who is a direct descendent of a Highland chief (sorry, I forget which), with a genuine pedigree. I can't boast those kind of relations, but I try to make up for it by playing the pipes as well as I can and being as good a representative of the culture as I can.