As I contemplate making a kilt from a family tartan (as opposed to a universal one) I decided I really should be a little more certain about my supposed affiliation with Clan MacPherson (through my great grandmother, whose name was MacLaury.) I wanted to see if I could find out where in Scotland the family came from. I'm pretty fortunate when it comes to genealogy because most of my descendants settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s; there's a lot of documentation on this side of the pond... and a great deal of genealogical research has been focused on those first ancestors in the New World, so a lot of them can be traced surprisingly far back.

I signed up for a free 14-day trial ("free" as long as you remember to cancel before they start billing you) at Ancestry.com and learned two interesting things:

The MacLaurys in my line are actually descended from one Thomas J. McClaughry, born in the Barony of Longford in Ireland. There was a 1913 genealogy of the McClaughrys that posits the name comes from the Gaelic "Mac Chlach righ" which translates to "Son of the King of the Stone" and further suggests that this may imply that the McClaughrys were fugitive MacGregors from Scotland, living under an assumed surname (http://cp1237.com/mcclgen/mccbio1.htm). I'll have to track down a copy of the book some time and see if the author backs that up with anything more substantial; it's romantic, but seems a bit tenuous.

Then I discovered through another line that my 16th great grandfather was Sir Robert de Munro, 8th Baron of Foulis... according to Wikipedia, Robert is the first Clan Chief who can be documented with contemporary evidence. So, it appears I'm descended from at least 9 generations of Munros, and probably more than that. Granted, the last Munro in my tree is a number of generations back but it's an unambiguous and fairly auspicious connection.