Tartan

As early as 3,000 years ago a mummified Celt man found in China was laid to rest, along with what appeared to be his family, wearing his plaid, however, while accounts vary it wasn't until around the 1500s that the wearing of plaid, what would be known as tartans, became popular with people of the Highlands.

 'Every isle differs from each other in their fancy of making plaids, as to the stripes and breadth and colours. This humour is as different through the main land of the Highlands in-so-far that they who have seen those places, are able, at the first view of a man's plaid, to guess the place of his residence...', wrote Martin Martin writing in 1703. 

Though patterns of tartan began as more regional recognition, nearing the last Jacobite rebellion it appears that the colors and their "sett" had become more specific to Clans.  So specific were these patterns that there is a story of a woman who sued a weaver she had hired for creating a pattern in "his awin fasoun" (own fashion).  She won the suit, by the way, resulting in a stint in jail for the weaver.

After the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, with its culmination at the doomed Battle of Culloden, along with the resulting Highland Clearances, forced emigration (and oftentimes indentured servitude) drove a people whose very identity was tied to the land their families had inhabited for centuries, across the globe. 

It's no wonder that today, as people long for belonging, a sense of identity and an understanding of their part in the human story, that family colors for those of Scottish heritage have become a tether to home; a colored cord that draws them back to their family's story and their own story in it.  It’s with these varying colors they all say with one voice, “Scotland Forever!”