New tartan finder - feedback please!

[MacTavishOfJapan]

Hi Nick,

I can't seem to find the MacTavish (1439) that I am having my kilt made in.

Also the listings for Thomson are all under Thompson (the English spelling - isn't tartan Scottish? ) When I search for Thomson it points me to Thompson - how about pointing to MacTavish as well as it's essentially same name?

Good search though! I wish I had been able to use it last week.

[Nick Fiddes]

I can't answer why that MacTavish has gone awol until I'm back in the office on Monday, but it will be fixed then. And as a proud Scot born and bred I'm afraid I have to hold my hands up to not being aware that the no-P version was more Scottish, but a quick check in the Edinburgh phone book confirms it's indeed several times more common. The alternative name thing is one of the next big things we're working on. Again, it's mucho complex, with clan septs, tartans valid for multiple surnames, variant spellings, mis-spellings, and sometimes valid arguments about whether one name is the same as another or not, etc. etc. And we'd of course like to get it right. So meanwhile we've installed a somewhat vague but mostly quite useful solution as you've discovered. Watch this space for further improvements!