Ponderings of an ancient Scot.

[Red Stag]

I have my mother's last name; it is Carty, and it has no tartan. As far as I can tell my surname used to have a "Mc" in front of it; there is no McCarty tartan. I have read that the McCarty used to be McCarthy. There is a McCarthy tartan designed pre-2000 by unknown. Can I wear that tartan? Who the heck would I ask? Should I design my own tartan for my variation of the surname? What about DNA deciding who wears a family tartan? I can tell you now that there are surname projects at Family Tree DNA that have people of the same surname but that are in different haplogroups thus suggesting that they are not related in a genealogical time frame (within 1000 years). Obviously my surname doesn't match my DNA. My haplotype is similar to people in Frisia. I'll be darned if I knew who the Frisian was in the family. I can't trace my paternal side back farther than my grandfather and we thought that he was full-blooded Indian(Mohawk/Ojibwe mix). Traditional paper genealogy can be wrong but some people will never know because they won't do a DNA test. People don't want to find out that they may be the milk man's baby; some people even get upset if it happened 150 years ago. Some current Celtic people may be the descendants of Norse or Frisian invaders and not know it. Do they give up their tartans if a DNA test prooves they aren't truly of a particular surname? Perhaps I should create the first DNA haplotype tartan. Only people with a haplotype similar to mine, regardless of surname, shall be allowed to wear it. What do ya think?

[joecool]

Excellent thread! I suppose my question is, "Will Scots still be wearing their clan tartans 100 years in the future? What about 200 years? 300 years?" The interesting thing about cultures is their propensity to change through time. Each new generation takes a little bit of the old and mixes it with the new. Many people choose to wear a tartan kilt to honor a connection that they have somewhere in their ancestry. I became interested in the kilt because of my late grandfather whose mother was Scottish. Obviously I am not a Scot, I am an American, so my dilemma becomes which tartan do I want to wear? I have several tartan kilts (all of them are universal type tartans,) but what clan tartan should I wear? For me, the answer is simple. My clan is all of my kilted brothers and sisters here on this forum, so my tartan is the XMTS tartan. As soon as I can afford it, I will purchase a kilt in this tartan to proudly display my "clan" affiliation.
So yes Jock, I think you are right that new tartans will be worn by the new generations. New non-Scottish "clans" are formed every day, and I am certain that there will always be kilts made out of those tartans for people to show their affiliation!