Which tartan for MacClive?

[Nathan]

Hate to put a spanner in the works regarding the gaelic origin of the name Livingston; and hence MacClive. According to the the Livingston Alive web site, the name has saxon origins. "Livingston Village gets its name from the Saxon named Leving or Leuing & from Old English tun or toun meaning settlement".

I came across that claim also. Well done finding that and thanks for bringing it into the discussion. Honestly, I don't think this throws much of a spanner in the works. We know that the Gaelic MacLeay clan often translated their name to "Livingston" and, along with McKinleys, come from Livingston. The fact that the town may have been named after a Saxon named Leving, wouldn't preclude a Gaelic speaking clan being subsequently named after the town. The original "Leod" form whom we get Leodhas (Lewis) and the MacLeod clans was probably Scandanavian but the MacLeod clan was definitely Gaelic.

Lets also remember how much of Scotland was at one time Gaelic speaking. Ayrshire isn't so far from Ireland, Galloway or Argyll and was certainly Gaelic at one point. The place names tell the tale. Kilmarnock = Cille Mheàrnaig, Ayr = Inbhir Air, Carrick = A' Charraig, so it's also possible that as Scots became the language of choice, Saxon roots became more desirable than Goidelic ones.

So we see a few competing theories of which Gaelic words (native or transliterated) the family names MacLeay, MacClive, Dunlevy, and Livingston come from but all of them are purported by some to trace back to "Dunnsleibhe" at some point. Is it "leibhe", a Gaelic transliteration of the Saxon Leving or is it "sleibhe" or physician or is it really a brown haired mountain chieftain?

There are lots of possibilities. One thing I've found out about studying Scottish history is that people are liberal publishing "facts" to suit their politics. Separating the myth and folklore from the historical record is indeed a challenge and sometimes it comes down to a coin toss with the two camps entrenched on various positions that have been debated for hundreds of years.

That's what makes it challenging, but it's also what makes it so much fun. There's always a puzzle and you can't always take what you see written at face value. This is even more true if you're reading a coffee table book about tartan or a website written by an enthusiastic lay person.

The unbiased rigour expected of an academic historian has never been expected of the folk historian or seannachie. Moreover, "antiquarians" made a lot of money manufacturing histories and Noble pedigrees for rich land owners in Scotland over the past two hundred plus years, so I suspect we'll spend the next six hundred untangling their creative versions of events if we ever succeed in doing so.

Since the sectarian divide, many families in Ireland and Scotland have re-written their histories to exclude or downplay any connection to their cousins from the other country.

Source documents contemporary to the time are, as always, our best resource, but they are not always at our finger tips.

Thanks to the OP for asking a challenging question that has so far lead to an interesting thread.