April 6th - How to Celebrate National Tartan Day

April 6th is National Tartan Day in America and you can celebrate by researching your family history and finding whether you have any Scottish - or Irish - heritage. Both the Irish and the Scottish have tartans. They both have bagpipes as well. Tartans are clan "plaids" from which clothing is made so that the whole family can be recognized at once.

But Beware-- Before his death in 1832, the successful writer Sir Walter Scott was behind the propagandist measure of creating phony tartans to give to Scottish workers and to English government officials that were not closely related to anyone in the UK. This included King George II, who was a German Hannover. Not all tartans are actual clan tartans. Research your family history thoroughly and deal only with respectable dealers of genealogy products. OR --

Create Your Own Tartan. You can do this for fun. After all, the original, legitimate clan tartans were created by people - the clans-people, families - in the first place. If you have young children, you can work with them in order to come up with your own family crest or coat of arms and tartan. Write a history of your family and while you chose the symbols you selected for your coat of arms - get the grandparents involved - and keep the history with your creations. You might want to use your new creations on T-shirts for your next family reunion.

This Interactive Tartan site lets you select up to 6 colors and create your own tartans. It presents a swatch to you that you can save and you can order cloth made in that pattern.

HOUSE OF TARTAN

Located in the UK, House of Tartan can be used to search for your official family or clan tartan, or to create one of your own. Visit House of Tartan and access the free Tartan Maker!

On March 9, 2005, the US House of Representatives successfully passed House Resolution 41 to create National Tartan Day. The day is meant to honor and highlight the accomplishments of Scottish Americans in the forward progress of the United States.

Previously, in March 1998, the US Senate chose April 6 as National Tartan Day to commerorate the date of the drafting of the Declaration of Arbroath. After much warring between Scotland and England up to the 1300s, the Declaration of Arbroath was finished on April 6, 1320. It was written by monks at Arbroath Abbey to support Scottish nobility and sent, written in Latin, to Pope John XXII, because he had not yet recognized Scotland as independent of England.

The Pope responded positively and influenced King Edward III, who recognized Scotland's King Robert (the Bruce) and Scotland a sovereign nation in 1328. The Declaration of Arbroath is is considered a major influence as well on the US Declaration of Independence 450 years later -- Nearly half of the American signers were Scots, Scots-Irish, or Scottish-American.

Today, over 200 Scottish heritage organizations and clubs in America hold a Robert Burns Night every year. Highland Games are held annually all through the South, where many Scots and Scots-Irish people settled from the time of British colonization of the New World. Scotland is everywhere in this land.

Various Confederate companies in the American Civil War adopted plaid garments in addition to the gray and the butternut brown uniforms that they wore. Many southern counties are named for Scottish landmarks and Culloden, Georgia is named for a merchant, but also is the site of a bloody battle in April, just as was Culloden in the UK. The horrors of the Two Cullodens link our countries forever, even if the rest of the shared attributes and heritage do not.

Southern states, on their own, have honored National Tartan Day before 1998; but HR 41 made it official nationwide.

• Buzz Aldrin
• Neil Armstrong
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Andrew Carnegie
• Julia Child
• Hugh Downs
• Thomas Edison
• Craig Ferguson
• Malcolm S. Forbes
• Billy Graham
• Alexander Hamilton
• John Paul Jones
• Washington Irving
• Peter Marshall - Pastor, husband to Catherine Marshall, writer
• Andrew Mellon
• Samuel F.B. Morse
• Grandma Moses
• James Naismith - Invented basketball
• Allan Pinkerton - Detective
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Gordon Ramsey - Hell's Kitchen
• Ginger Rogers
• Willard Scott
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• James Whistler

US States and several cities have begun to host Tartan Weeks and Tartan Month in the USA with parades, festivals, music, and many sorts of activities. It' all becoming as big as St.Patrick's Day. See the links below for more.