My family’s pretty Scottish, despite the fact that the most recently anyone in my family tree actually lived in Scotland was around the middle of the 19th century. When the Scots on my mother’s side of the family — all Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders — migrated to what is now Nova Scotia, they lived in little communities filled with other Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, usually from the same places they were from. When one thinks of such people, one might imagine they wore kilts. They were, after all, very Scottish. However, that wasn’t the case.

Duncan MacLeod of Eigg, whom I often call Duncan the Gardener, probably didn’t wear a kilt, which in his lifetime had long since ceased to be an integral part of the Gael’s daily dress, even in Scotland. His children most probably didn’t wear kilts, including his son Angus, my great-great-grandfather, who lived on River Denys Mountain in a place called Upper Southwest Mabou, in Glencoe. Angus married Jessie MacInnis of Judique Intervale, whose family also probably didn’t wear kilts. Instead, the Scottish men in my family, who were all very Scottish, wore pants. Probably wool pants. They probably didn’t even care much about tartans and clans and all that. The Jacobites’ loss at the Battle of Culloden had a lot to do with this, but it might also have had something to do with the fact that people (and peoples) change. They move on; they adapt; they evolve.

I wore a kilt the evening of my wedding reception. In fact, for several years the wearing of kilts at weddings and other formal occasions has been gaining in popularity where I’m from. For the wedding itself, the day before, I had worn regular clothes, a shirt and tie and all that. But for the wedding reception, I was decked out in full Highland dress, complete with kilt, sporran, sgian dubh, the whole nine yards. Leen and I were even piped into the hall. I wore the MacLeod tartan, something I had long before promised my mother I would do, to honour her family. But while I was honouring my mother’s family, and perhaps following traditions once followed by my ancestors, I was really doing something that people in my family probably hadn’t done for over two hundred years. I was recreating a romanticised version of my family history, though I have no regrets for having done so.

Who knows? Maybe my Scottish ancestors in Canada did wear kilts. I was told by an elderly relative that my great-grandfather, William MacVay, wore a kilt at least once…though he was probably just looking back to a romantic family past, the way I would years later. Surely some people in my family have donned kilts in the last couple of centuries. In fact, I do know of one post-Culloden, post-migration example of someone who owned a kilt on my mother’s side: a young man named Duncan MacLeod, a son of my great-great-grandfather, Angus.

Duncan was born in 1890 in that small, Catholic, Gaelic-speaking community the MacLeods had settled into. My grandfather once told me that Duncan, his uncle, had joined a local Highland regiment during World War I and had been given a kilt as part of his dress uniform. As the story goes, the war ended just as Duncan was walking off the ship in England, so he turned around and walked right back on and went home. His kilt was hung on a wall in his living room, where it remained for several years. He had only worn it a few times.

Duncan, who was noted for his strength and also for his fiddle-playing, married and moved to Cochrane Ontario, where he worked in a mine. It was his job to set explosive charges in the mine. On September 26th, 1928, he set a charge but it didn’t go off. When he went back down to see what the problem was, the charge blew, and ended the life of Duncan MacLeod. He was 37 years old. My grandfather, born the previous year, was named after him. Knowing this, it’s easy to see the connection between my grandfather and the earliest known Duncan MacLeod in our family: Papa was named after his uncle, who was probably named after his grandfather, the Duncan MacLeod who migrated to Cape Breton, who was probably named after his grandfather, Duncan MacLeod of Skye, who fought at the Battle of Culloden.

I don’t know the whole story, really. And I don’t know what happened to the kilt that was hanging on the wall of the MacLeods’ home in Upper Southwest Mabou. The kilt I wore was returned to the place I had rented it from the day after the wedding reception.

Papa’s uncle Robert MacLeod, who died on April 5th 1987 at the age of 71, was a member of the Cape Breton Highlanders during World War II. As a member of that regiment, he may have worn a kilt as well.

But that’s a story for another day.