When I first started attending Scottish festivals and Highland games, I observed two different types of clans: those that focused on building community, and those that were mostly business. The “business” ones would answer your questions, give you lots of info about joining the clan and then send you on your way. The welcoming ones tended to be more interested in their visitors as people to get to know – not just as potential clan members. They liked making connections for the sake of the shared experience.
As I prepared to help host first the Clan Chattan tent at the 66th Annual Grandfather Mountain Highland Games (GMHG) in western North Carolina, I was hopeful that we would be the welcoming and inclusive sort – that we could create a sense of kinship, camaraderie and connectedness for all who wanted or needed it.
We started on the path to inclusion when Barry McPhail and I met at the GMHG in 2021 and decided that we wanted to try and convene for Clan Chattan in 2022. We were motivated by the fact that some of the 12 clans in the Clan Chattan confederation have little to no representation at many Highland games. Getting volunteers to host or convene for a clan is a challenge for large clans; for small ones, like MacPhail or Phail, it’s almost impossible.
The McFalls/McPhails converge on the Games
With a large group of McFalls cousins based in western North Carolina, I was hopeful that we would at least have plenty of people showing up to see us! The 2021 GMHG had served as an opportunity for some of us descendants of old Arter or Arthur McFalls to meet for the first time, and for 2022 we were gathering even more.
Arthur was born in 1751 in Virginia, maybe a first generation Scots-Irish, though we have yet to confirm whether it was his father or grandfather who first came to the colonies. Through a Facebook group and this blog, we’ve been able to connect with descendants of nine of his 10 children here in the United States as well as with Scottish and Irish cousins, who likely descend from other members of the same family. This year at the GMHG we had 11 descendants representing four of his children, and we met a few new McFall/s who we have yet to fit in the family tree. But we will!
In addition, we discovered a McPhaul who serendipitously happened to be next door in the neighboring St. Andrew’s Society of North Carolina tent. (He ended up being our clan flag bearer in the pouring rain in Sunday’s tartan parade!) It’s likely that he and our host Barry McPhail connect as their McPhail ancestors appear to have first settled in the Cape Fear area of North Carolina and then moved west. The advantage to having a less common surname is that we tend to all connect to one family that immigrated to the colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
Building community beyond the clan
But that was about our familial connections. The other community we created over the weekend was with the many people who were seeking a connection – perhaps to a Clan Chattan clan not represented at the GMHG (like the Farquharsons who discovered us on Saturday, bought us food and drink, kept our tent secure in the downpours, offered to help convene the Clan Chattan tent next year and were recruited to carry our banner in the aforementioned soggy tartan parade) or to other people who shared Scottish or Irish DNA or to others who had an interest in all things Celtic.
The past few years of the pandemic have separated us and made it harder to build communities outside of our close friends and family. But social connections of all sorts are important to our health, happiness and overall well being.
As we met and gathered folks from other Clan Chattan clans, we also adopted people who needed a clan home. We didn’t ask for their credentials or proof of their hereditary connection to the Davidson, Farquharson, MacBean, MacGillivray, MacIntyres of Badenoch, Mackintosh, Maclean of Dochgarroch, MacPhail, Macpherson, MacQueens of Strathdearn, Shaw or MacThomas clans. Instead, we hugged the necks of recently discovered family members, made new friends, bonded over common interests and passions, shared food and a few wee drams, got soaked to the skin in the dreich weather on Sunday, exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, followed each other on Facebook and Instagram and planned together how to make Clan Chattan at the 2023 Grandfather Mountain Highland Games more welcoming and inclusive. Because it’s less about being with the family you belong to and more about finding the clan (or community) with whom you fit.
