The most ridiculous.......

[JSFMACLJR]

I have been told a number of times that if your name prefix is "Mc" it is Irish and if "Mac" it is Scottish. Must have been a lot of settlers from Argyllshire in SW Ontario who didn't know their true ethnicity.

Yeah, it wouldn't make any sense going around saying you were Irish if you came from Argyllshire!

[JolyStNicholas]

I have seen this referenced in more than one artical. "Scribes recorded and spelled names as they sounded. It was not unlikely that a person would be born with one spelling, married with another, and buried with a headstone which showed another spelling." I have traced my family name back in both English and Scottish history, spellings arranged from Seton,Sutton,Suton to Suttone and many others. I think all of us have the same namings.
{Is that the right word?}

[macwilkin]

"Mc" and "Mac"...it doesn't matter. Really. My MacLean forebearers left the Isle of Mull, spelling their surname McLean. Two generations later it was MacLean.

The spelling issue is a total fabrication, as far as denoting Scottish heritage. The use is interchangeable, due to notoriously poor spelling abilities! As to how the Irish do it, I just don't know.

Norman Maclean has an interesting comment about the spelling of his surname in A River Runs Though It; when his father, the Rev. Maclean, finds out that his younger son Paul has changed the spelling of their name to "MacLean", he remarks sadly that now "everyone will think we're Lowlanders and not Islanders."

It's not only in the story, but in the movie as well.

T.

[Dirk Skene]

Myths: you can only wear your family tartan. You can't wear flat caps with a kilt.

Facts: Pleats go IN THE BACK. Don't wear flashes if you push your socks down.

[O'Callaghan]

See this thread:
http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/s...680/index.html

Also, that kilts are in any way Irish. (or English, Norse, or Welsh for that matter.)

This was supposed to be myths. If you had been speaking about the link you posted in that other thread, then that is a myth. What it claims is that each Irish clan wore a different colour kilt, which IS nonsense.

However, there were Irish clans. There were also Irish kilts, but not in the same century.

To say that it's a myth "that kilts are in any way Irish" goes too far to actually be true, because it definitely is true that (1) kilts have been worn in Ireland in centuries previous to this one; and (2) the Scots first developped the great kilt from the Irish brath and leine by the simple expedient of wearing the belt on the outside of the brath (cloak)!

Trying to be kind, perhaps you should have said it was a myth that the kilt was first worn somewhere other than Scotland. Now, that I would have accepted as true.

[dfmacliam]

That you can tell who has the Pict blood by the way they are built .. This was discussed in my presence before and what made it so humorous was they were serious .. Feet hips chest and so on

[dfmacliam]

Oh and another thought I seen discussed is the tartan is uniquely a Highland item, yet a Celtic peoples in what is now China, had tartan like cloth found with many bodies dug up in graves.

[wvpiper]

That bagpipes were banned and players faced the penalty of death by the Act of Proscription.

[gilmore]

"Mc" and "Mac"...it doesn't matter. Really. My MacLean forebearers left the Isle of Mull, spelling their surname McLean. Two generations later it was MacLean.

The spelling issue is a total fabrication, as far as denoting Scottish heritage. The use is interchangeable, due to notoriously poor spelling abilities! ...

It's not poor spelling. Up until the arrival in the early 19th century of dictionaries that prescribed how words should be spelled, spelling was more descriptive than exact, and everyone spelled words as they heard them and as they themselves pronounced them. There was no correct spelling before then.

I have a copy of deed of land of one of my patrilineal ancestors from the 1750's. The clerk who copied the original deed into the deed book spelled my ancestor's signature one way, the same way we do today. In the body of the deed, the clerk spelled his name another way. And it was filed under a third spelling. None of these were correct or incorrect. It was every man's spelling for itself in those days.

[Swampthing]

That bagpipes were banned and players faced the penalty of death by the Act of Proscription.

Actually, that is true. However, a similar incident did occur.
Just after the Jacobite uprisings, the government had captured a Jacobite (no duh). When they charged him, he claimed he wasn't a soldier but, only a mere Piper as well a Jacobite. They then decided to consider pipes a weapon, thus allowing them to kill him. Now, I don't remember his name nor when exactly this happened, I used to, but now I don't. I'll look for it.