Quote Originally Posted by gilmore View Post
It may be that the vendor was refering to the fact that Clan Gunn has no chief, and without a chief there is no clan, strictly speaking. It could be said to be a broken clan. There is a commander of the clan, and there are three claimants to the chiefship, the last I heard, though according to the gossip that was relayed to me, the man with the best claim was an American who wasn't interested in it. This was told to me a few years ago, and I pass it on to you for what it may be worth now.

Something else that the vendor may have been refering to is that the clan Gunn associations are among the worst in fishing for members, aided and abetted by the tartan merchants. It is claimed that some very common names such as Brown, Robinson, Nelson and others are septs of the Gunn clan. Most of the bearers of these names have no Scots ancestry whatsoever. (I do not dispute that some few bearing these names may have had ancestors with traditional connection to the Gunns.) And of course tartan merchants rarely discourage unknowing newbies from spending money with them.

I have posted elsewhere in another thread how it has been shown through both demographic research as well as Y chromosome DNA testing that most who bear these common names have no historical, genetic or genealogical connection to the Gunn clan. If you have trouble finding the post using the search feature, PM me and I will locate it for you.
Most names associated with any clan (Sept) will not necessarily have blood ties and in a lot of cases these names don't even have an historical attachment and is based on Victorian romanticism perpetrated in the main by the historian 'The Venerable Bede, William Forbes Skene'.