I hope that the following relates all of the details that you require.  I have tried to include everything that might be pertinent to your article.  If you need any additional information, please let me know.  At the end of this message I have included the graphics of the tartans along with the crests, mottoes, and ordinaries of the Laings and Langs.  By way of explanation, while not all Langs are derived of Laing, the majority in Scotland were and this is reflected in the arms and plant badge.  Not all highlanders were literate, and so when an official or member of the clergy wrote their names for them it was often spelled phonetically as "Lang".  The individual may later have to print his name and would copy verbatim what was on his papers so many Laings became Langs.  With the exception of the Langs derived of OLanachan, the two are pretty much interchangeable.  In like manner, after 1746, many Langs became Longs when the British began their anglicised census records.  The same explanation holds true for place names as well, perhaps because after a while the inhabitants and visitors both believed that the name described the length of the feature rather than having been named after the inhabitants: Langside, Langbank, Loch Long, Long-Gordon, etc.

In late 1999 at the insistence of a remote relative, I agreed to host a Laing genealogical web site.  This was to be for the express purpose of Laings, Layngs, and Langs derived of Laing, all of Scottish descent, to interrelate and to share information over the internet.  In short order there were a fair number at the site all wanting to know more of their Scottish heritage.   I had researched the history of the family for some years and had at my disposal considerable information on the Laing crests, mottoes, plant badge and history.  I knew too of the tartan which was recovered from an 1853 grave but which was never registered.  All of this was what was behind my relative's prodding to start the site of course.

The following letter is from my brother, Reverend Michael T. Laing, who was at the exhumation of George H. Laing who died in Leon County, Texas in 1853.  George was a descendent of a family from Renfrewshire that took refuge along the South Carolina and Georgia coastlines in the early to mid 1700's.  It appears that this migration was well planned and organized as apparently they managed to eventually move a fair fortune to their new home and established for themselves some very successful rice plantations.   For a considerable time thereafter, the descendents of these Scottish immigrants maintained their uniquely Scottish identity while distinguishing themselves in the taming of a frontier country.   We are not sure why the knowledge of the sett of the tartans was lost, but believe that it had to do with the losses that the family suffered during the American Civil War.  As for why it persisted as a tradition for 100 or more years, this particular branch of the Laings has always venerated their Scottish origins and coincidentally were located within enclaves of Scottish settlers in Georgia and then Texas.  Marriages to more recent Boyd, Hendry, Stevenson, Graham, and Kersey immigrants to name a few, in all likelihood served to reinforce this tradition.

Reverend Laing had many discussions with the late Dr. Gordon Teall of the Scottish Tartans Society concerning the recovered tartan.  It was Dr. Teall's opinion that the tartan originated from a source earlier than 1740 (William, the earliest Laing of my line was already here in 1737, though not permanently) and therefore represented a unique find.   Reverend Laing never had the tartan registered as a letter from Dr. Teall indicated that this would cost some 2000 pounds sterling (in 1979).  This may have been a mistyped error, or else at the time the Society may have actually been charging an appreciably larger sum.  The end result was that following a family conference, it was decided that the Laings originated the tartan, wove it, and wore it and there was no need to spend such an amount to reweave or wear it.  This is where matters stood for almost twenty years until my efforts with the web site to reacquaint less informed distant relatives of their heritage led me to check once again on the cost of registration.  As it now stands at 200 pounds sterling and there are a larger number of relatives to share the cost, it was decided that the tartan should be registered after all.  Lacking the information and notes of my brother, I asked him to write me a letter describing the recovery of the tartan.

My brother's letter which I have here reproduced verbatim, has been stamped with a notary seal which in the USA makes it a legal and court acceptable document.  It describes how the Laing family tartan was recovered and gives a little of the history of that part of Texas at the time in which George lived.  Additional detail on the Laings follows the letter.
 

Daniel H. Laing
PO Box 1804
Midlothian VA 23113-1804
 

Dear Daniel,
 

 You asked me to write to you the details of the situation surrounding the moving of the graves of Barbra and George H. Laing in 1979, and the action taken on my part and that of our cousin Wesley.

      In July of 79 I recieved a phone call from the treasurer of the Alvin Moore Methodist Church in Oakwood, Texas. I had served as pastor of that church for two and a half years before being transferred to Jewett, where I was residing at the time. She asked me if I remembered a particular parishioner who was a farmer there in Oakwood. She related that he was about to build a new farm pond, or "tank" as they were called in East Texas. The construction was to innundate the lower one third of the old cemetary.  Fifty Six graves were going to be moved at the expense of the farmer building the pond. The reason I was contacted is because one of the fifty six had the same last name and spelling as mine. The two questions were: 1) Could this be a relative, and 2) would I like to be present when they moved him. My response was, "I don't know, and absolutely, in that order."

 The preparations for the moving of so many took some two and a half months from the time I was first contacted. During this time I spent a great amount of time going through the archives of records in the courthouse of Leon County in Centerville. I had spoken to Dad and Uncle Lavern about the situation and who the residents of the graves were. Dad and Uncle Lavern related that this George H. was our Great Great Great Grandfather, who passed away in 1853. The courthouse records held a fair amount of data relating to George and Barbra's estate. Since there was no will, it took some years to get the estate all the way through probate, so records were scattered over many years of probate calls for the disposition of the estate to the point that the executor for the estate was finally charged with contempt of court in order to get him moving.

 George Chavers, the farmer which owned the property next to the church, donated 25 acres adjacent to the church to replace the 12 acres that were about to be flooded. Lanely Creek was no more than 14 feet from the cemetery vertically measured and something like forty five feet up the bank along the surface. Hard pan clay was layered with sand deposits of 6 to 8 feet each. Even though the base of the grave area was as much as 8 feet deep the graves were entirely above the high water mark of the creek until the dam was built. The composition of the sandy clay soils kept the graves in relatively good condition, considering the age of the burials.

 It had taken two and a half months  from the time that the Church Secretary Treasurer, Pearl Hardin had contacted me until the time Mr. Chavers was ready to dig. On the day we moved the graves both Wesley Laing and I were present at the cemetary. Wesley was a second cousin of ours through connections with Uncle Lavern. Wesley was a retired professor of Geneology from a University in Boston I think. He had a polaroid camera and asked me for copies of all of the courthouse records I had gotten through the weeks spent at the Leon County courthouse in Centerville.  He also had acquired a copy of a page from the family Bible that he related as having belonged to Barbra, George's wife. It related details of the funeral of George and who of the family were and were not present. It also related a pecular entry in that it said that "'G.', was layed out in a family plaide."  We had no clue at the time what this might have meant.

 The grave site had an eight foot long by three and a half foot wide sand stone slab which had depressions indicating that some text had once been on it but which was no longer legible and none letters were even recognizable. Positive identification was obtained from the row and lot references contained in the old church records that went back to burials made for comanche raids that occured in 1834. These were the series of raids that resulted in the kidnaping of Cynthia Ann Parker of Mexia (Parkers Fort).  As you will recall she was the mother of Quana Parker, Commanche Chief and later in life Federal District Judge.

 The stone was removed in two pieces, it having broken diagonally into roughly 1/3 at the top and 2/3rds at the bottom.   The excavating was accomplished using a backhoe and several workmen. When a casket was encountered the workmen would get into the grave and clean the soil and debris away. The caskets were then place into rough out boxes to be re-intered.

 Barbra's casket was on top of George's. The top of this casket was at a depth of about four feet. The original rough out box or cribbing though evident was gone. The casket however, was in very good condition; intact and still sealed. Wesley took several pictures of the coffin before it was removed and after it was placed into the new rough out box. Barbra's casket was of a hard wood which appeared to be black walnut, finely crafted with wrought iron nails, wooden pegs and mittered corners. I talked to Wesley and as the coffin seemed to be still tightly sealed, we decided not to open her casket.  Once Barbra's casket was removed from the grave, we could see that her coffin had been placed directly on top of that of George, and that the lid of the lower casket was slightly caved in. There had also been a rough out box for the casket of George, but the workmanship of his casket was of a rougher quality than Barbra's. I got down into the open grave and worked with one of the workmen to remove the lid pieces. Wesley snapped pictures as we proceded: first of the broken lid and then the contents as we removed chunks of wood. We received a major shock when the body was finally revealed. George was buried in a kilt, in East Texas, in 1853! The body was badly desicated, but its attire was easily recognizable. He was very tall, something over six feet and though most of the flesh was gone, there were still patches of grey hair and his clothing, though very brittle and badly discolored with age, was still very recognizable and preserved enough to be of significant value.

 George was wearing a great kilt (belted) with extra folds of material brought up behind and pinned over his left shoulder with what looked to be a large Luckenbooth about three inches across.  The cloth was bunched up under his left side and shoulder causing the body to be slightly rolled onto the right side. The folds of the kilt were pulled around the body in such a way as to place the aprons not in the front, but off to the right side of and slightly under the body. There was a pouch type sporan over the left hip and a rather nicely appointed dirk and in the debris what seemed to be a small knife and fork although these were not distrubed. There was a pronounced lump under his vest on the right side which proved to be a simple skeen dube.

 Though most of the cloth had been damaged by body fluids and was so dessicated that it crumbled to the touch, I did extract from two to three layers beneath the sporan a small portion of cloth about four and a half by seven inches, taken on the diagonal across the main part of the sett. Wesley placed this between two pieces of glass that he got in town and I was able with a magnifying glass to get a good thread count latter. George was not wearing any shoes but did have on hose made of cloth and he also wore a dark vest with numerous buttons over a light colored (probably white) shirt. On the side of the body laying within the casket was a balmoral bonnet folded with a light colored ribbon or cockade and several sticks pinned to the ribbon. What plant this might have been was not discernable.

 George's casket was lifted out of the grave, covered with a cut piece of plywood, placed into a rough out box and reintered with the casket of Barbra in the new section of the cemetary.

      Wesley gave me several polariod pictures of the body and I told him I would contact an acquaintence of mine, a Dr. Gordon Teall who was the director of the Scottish Tartan Society of Edinburgh. I had met Dr. Teall on several occasions at the Highland games at Stone Mountain in Atlanta. Dr. Teall was a member of the Gordon Society as was I, so I sent the photos and thread count to him to help me track it down.

      Several months after the correspondance, I got a rather lengthy letter from Dr. Teall and an offer for further assistance. He indicated that records suggested sept relationships of the Laings to four different clans: the McDonalds, the Gordons, the Leslies and the Colquhouns. Comparing the sett from the grave with not only these four but through computer with several thousand known and registered plaids, ours did not match anything he could find. He had approached a couple of tartan historians in Scotland over the way the colors and simple pattern presented an unusually plain sett. The response was that due to the use of certain colors and the lack of others as well as the very plain pattern, it was suggested that this was one of the plaids that pre-dated proscription of the plaid after Culloden. He wanted to know if we knew of any more examples of the plaid.

      Dr. Teall also informed me that if I was so inclined that he could have the plaid registered with the Tartan society.  He said he would be glad to do so for 2000 pounds stirling. He also gave me the names of five weavers to get the sett rewoven. On contact with these weavers the least any would weave was 100 yards and the price would run between 40 and 60 dollars per yard. I decided that while I wanted both registration and the rewoven cloth, I really didn't want it that badly. Dr. Teall and I continued to converse at the games in Atlanta but I never did try to pursue the registration or reweaving (at least not on a large scale) anymore. I became disillusioned at working with some of the mercenary types that had been gravitating to geneological research and eventually, except for continuing to check out leads on tartan remnants or small hand-loom weavers, pretty much quit working with the plaid until your interest in it had me dragging out the few boxes of old papers that I had not purged through my moves.

      I don't have any of the polariods anymore but Dr. Teall's files and Wesley's documents should still have them for whatever value 20 year old polariods might be. Wesley probably went through a dozen packs of film but only gave me 5 pictures which I in turn sent to Dr. Teall with a thread count. I was there though, and was present through all of this.

      I hope this helps in your inquiry and I hope you are able to get further with the registration and reweaving than I did.
 

                                         In Christ Your Brother,
 

  Notary                                 Rev. Michael T. Laing, O.S.L.
 
 

The Laing family or clan, however one wishes to view them, were associated with numerous clans and were distributed throughout Scotland.  The Highland Laings with whom the recovered tartan originated, were associated with the Gordons, Leslies, Robertsons, and Colquhouns.  There was also a brief association with the MacDonalds although this was late and involved the Jacobite rebellion.

Laings were also located along the shores and waterways around Inverness where they were associated with the Gayres, and there was a group on the Western Isles where they were associated with the Morrisons.  One of the largest concentrations of the family was in the Orkney and Shetland Islands where it seems that they had been since about the 8th century.

Like most Highland inhabitants at the time, all Laings were not literate.  Due to the attempted Anglicization of the Highlands and the English penchant for counting everybody, all too often the Laing name was spelled Lang or even Long.  This unfortunately and more often than not became a permanent adaptation by the individuals so renamed as they would copy verbatim that which was printed on their papers. This is well known, and provided additional corroborative evidence as to the authenticity of the tartan through the archives of the Scottish Tartans Society (STS).

My brother sent me the thread count that he and Dr. Teall had obtained from the tartan and the grave site photographs in September of 1999.  He had fortunately preserved this in his files through his many moves.  The thread count obtained from the sample recovered from the 1853 grave of George H. Laing and verified from the photographs by Dr. Teall from pivot point to pivot point is: 2 red, 4 yellow, 4 blue, 12 yellow, 4 blue, 16 yellow, 4 blue, 4 red, 104 blue, 4 white, 4 blue, 16 black, 4 blue, 12 black, 2 blue.

In short order I was able to locate and modify a program that would recreate the tartan graphically on the computer.  I sent this to the STS via e-mail in early January of 2000.   I had also found a similarly patterned Lang tartan in their electronic files and noted this in my letter.  One of their researchers quickly replied that the two patterns were indeed a match but that the Lang tartan in their files was what was called a dipped tartan.  This is a dying process in which waxed strips of paper were laid out in a pattern on a solidly colored woolen cloth and a sponge was moistened in a bowl of dye and patted along the strips of paper creating the pattern.  In the case of the Lang tartan, blue cloth was used with yellow and black dye creating a green and black overcheck.  The design of the Lang Dipped Tartan matched that of the 1853 tartan without the finer details of the red and white threads, but the dipped tartan contained a doubled overcheck.  Since I did not include a full reversal of the pattern in my original letter, the researcher suggested that the tartan that we had recovered was the valid ancient pattern and he included a doubled pattern of our original in his reply.  We all now believe that the original which was probably brought to this country as early as 1740 had further evolved into a slightly more complex one in order to bring its appearance more in line with the tartans that were being popularized in the 1800's. This would be probable as Barbra, George H. Laing's wife, mentioned in her Bible that he was burried in one of the family's plaides.  The STS researcher is certain that the dipped tartan created perhaps for trade purposes, was a copy of a family tartan and maintains that based on the evidence that the doubled pattern is a valid Laing tartan as well. The count for this tartan would be: 2 red, 4 yellow, 4 blue, 12 yellow, 4 blue, 16 yellow, 4 blue, 4 red, 104 blue, 4 white, 4 blue, 16 black, 4 blue, 12 black, 4 blue, 16 black, 4 blue, 4 white, 52 blue from pivot point to pivot point. Both counts given in this paragraph are half counts at the pivot points. To obtain full thread counts around the pivot points in the manner required for Scottish Tartans Society registration, the counts at the beginning and end of the setts must be doubled.

I had also asked in my letter for reproductions of the materials mentioned above in my brother's letter.  Unfortunately, the materials I requested could not be found in the files of the late Dr. Teall at the STS.  These may yet turn up elsewhere however. The researcher at the STS that performed the investigations is one Mr. Keith Lumsden.   Like many good researchers, Keith is more interested in the research and discovery than publicity, so pleaseobtain his permission before mentioning him in print.  His response to my initial inquiry and the announcement of his discovery of the match between the two tartans is below.  I feel that he deserves credit for the corroborative evidence that he uncovered, but he is a modest gentleman so may refuse mention.
 

Dear Daniel,

Looking at your thread count the two tartans are too geometrically similar not to have a relationship. I have therefore made inquiries as to the meaning of 'dipped' when applied to tartan as opposed to sheep! It means dyed after it has been woven.  As a result I think your have the undyed version of Mr Lang's tartan.

I have adjusted your thread count to make it correspond with Mr Lang's. I suspect you have not got the correct pivot at its end. (A repeating tartan
must have two pivots).

The process of dying must have covered up the white and red in yours. The dye used was blue I would have thought .

I have reconstructed these two in to separate TIF files :- Laing003.tif Your design and Leng119.tif which is Mr Lang's

I attached also Laingarc.tif which is Laing of Archiestown. You can see this has no connection to the others.

I would point out that these images are not our best as they can cause problems sending them e-mail on some servers so I have played around with
them hoping to reduce them enough. You will notice our Internet site images are poor. This because we sell authentic tartan images and don't want them just copied off the site.

The production of shades such as Ancient, Modern, Weathered, Reproduction etc etc... we avoid not only for the reasons you have found but also that
they vary between weavers. We just endeavor to show a tartan so it can be easily recognised.

Dr Teall's papers do not reveal any of your correspondence I am afraid.

I hope the attachment come out.

Yours Keith
 Researcher,
Scottish Tartans Society,
Port na Craig Road,
Pitlochry, PH16 5ND
Tel :- 0044 (0) 1796 474079
Fax:- 0044 (0) 1769 474090
Web Site :- http://www.tartans.scotland.net Researcher,

1982. It was gifted by a :- Malcolm J. Lang, 11 Ironwood Drive, Westfield
Centre, Ohio 44251.
 

Currently the Clans Laing Association is having the tartan recovered from the 1853 grave registered as the Laing Ancient Tartan. This will be a valid family or clan tartan for all Laings and variants of that name including the Layngs and Langs or Longs derived of Laing. Shortly we will submit the design suggested by the TS119 Lang dipped tartan as well. One other Laing tartan has surfaced in recent years: the Laing of Archiestown tartan.  We believe it to have been unique originally to the Laings in the vicinity of Inverness and Nairn.

Plant Badge

  Laing

        Three oak sprigs, acorned

  Lang

      Three oak sprigs, acorned
 
 

Crests

    Laing

            1) Of Harwick: A dove holding in its beak a sprig of olive, all purpure
                 Motto: Misericordia est mia cupido

            2) A dove holding in its beak sprig of olive, all purpure
                Motto: Mercy is my desire

            3) Sir James of Thornhill, Sunderland: In front of a demi-catharine
                wheel sable, A dove holding in the beak two sprigs of olive slipped purpure

            4) A cock gules
                Motto: Vigilant

            5) A cock purpure
                Motto: Vigilance

            6) A bear's head and neck purpure, muzzled argent
                Motto: Labor omnia superat

    Lang

            1) A dove holding in its beak an olive branch, purpure
                Motto: Mercy is my desire

            2) A tower argent, Masoned sable
                Motto: Une stay

            3) Three sprigs of oak, acorned
                Motto: Honeste
 
 

Ordinaries

    Laing

            1) Of Rothisholm, Orkneys (1808)
                Argent a bend wavy between two mullets in chief azure,
                and a fleur de lys in base gules

            2) James, Portioner of Morisland, Scotland (1672)
                Parted per pale engrailed argent and sable
                a chief indented counter-changed

            3) John Weir (Laing-1801)

                A) Argent on a fess azure three mullets of the field,
                    in chief a fleur de lys gules (1st and 4th quarters);
                    over all in the center of the four quarters a spur-revel
                    of six points gules

               B) Argent three piles conjoined in point sable,
                    in the middle chief point a martlet orle
                    (2nd and 3rd quarters); over all in the center of the
                    four quarters a spur-revel of six points gules

    Lang

        None