12-22-99: This is the tartan recovered from the 1853 grave of George Henry Laing. I obtained a Java program written by Gregory J. Scott to recreate the tartan as the computer graphic below.
1-10-00: I used my browser to incrementally work through the STS files and have come across what is apparently a poorly reproduced copy of our recovered tartan. The web location is http://www.tartans.scotland.net/Pages/tartan_register_ts119.html
1-11-00: I have electronically copied a segment of our tartan that looks like it can be overlain on the ts119 sample for a close match. I wrote a letter of inquiry to the STS and included a JPG of my extracted copy of the George H. tartan scaled to the same size so they can compare them.
1-13-00: I heard back from the STS. A researcher named Keith Lumsden replied. TS119 turned out to be a doubled pattern. I could not tell this by what they had displayed on the web, and of course based upon what I sent them they could not tell that ours was not. Keith has explained that The Lang tartan was not what I thought it was. It actually does contain green stripes, along with the black of course, and it is what is called a "dipped" tartan. He explained that dipped is a term used for a dyed rather than woven tartan. The details of the process as he described them seem a little vague.
1-14-00: Keith also must have spent considerable time on his computer working with the graphic I sent him as he had attached a doubled copy of our tartan as well and suggested that this would be the proper repeat of the pattern. I hated to have to tell him in my reply that my brother was there when the grave was opened and could verify that the pattern was not a doubled one.
1-21-00: I consulted an old friend in the textile industry in Columbus, Georgia. Mr. Collier was a gentleman that I had met at one of the restaurants there. As we were both regular customers, and had a fondness for diverse conversation, we became well acquainted. He was familiar with the process and told me that it is still in use today by hobbyists. He said that it is also called the dry sponge method. A dipped tartan is made by laying out an existing tartan on a flat surface and then framing it with stiff pasteboard or cardboard. A template is made by cutting waxed strips of paper and laying them out on the tartan in a manner by which the edges of the strips exactly frame the colored stripes on the tartan. These paper strips are laid in one direction only. When finished one has a parallel pattern of waxed strips of paper. These are attached to the pasteboard frame by the simple application of a hot iron.
A framed template is made for each of the different overchecks in the tartan. When all are complete, a large piece of material of the same color as the background of the tartan is laid flat. One of the templates is turned over and overlain on the cloth. Using a hot iron the waxed paper is bonded to the material. A sponge of the correct color is then dipped into a bowl of dye and wrung until just slightly moist, almost dry. The sponge is then daubed along and between the paper strips. A strip can be redaubed several times to get the right degree of color intensity. The frame is removed, rotated 90 degrees, laid back down again, and the daubing process is repeated to form a complete overcheck. Having repeated the process for each color and template, the dipped tartan is sun dried for a day or two, rinsed in cold water to remove excess dye, and then dipped in hot water to set the colors. It is fairly obvious that to obtain the green stripes in the ts119 tartan that a yellow!
dye (just as in our recovered tartan) had to have been applied over the blue background. If both Keith and Mr. Collier are correct then I should be able to recreate the dipped Laing tartan from the thread counts of the recovered tartan using the Scott program.
2-2-00: The program was written for a sett of only twenty different colored thread counts. I had to obtain the source code, modify it, and recompile it so that it could handle the doubled pattern. Examining the ts119 image I could tell by the squares on the corners of the green over checks and the rectangles within them that the waxed paper strips must have bordered on the outside edges the white and red four thread wide stripes. These would have been details that could not have been reproduced by the coarser dipping method anyway.
Since color variations and contrasts themselves can mislead the eye, I analyzed the colors in the ts119 image using Paint Shop Pro and noted the red, green, and blue intensities for each color. I then substituted these for the blue, black, and yellow (which was replaced with green)in our recovered tartan. Since the red threads would have been bounded by the waxed paper, I replaced this color with the green hue I obtained from the ts119 image, and the narrow blue stripes between what was the red threads and the nearest yellow as well. I repeated this process for the off-black checks and white bordering threads as well. As a final step, I replaced the blue in the original program with the hue obtained for that color from the ts119 tartan. The following appears to be a perfect match to the ts119 tartan were it twill woven.
2-16-00: As an additional check I captured the image from the program and saved it as a GIF file. I then sharpened the ts119 image stripes using appropriate filters in Paint Brush Pro so that I could clearly see the edges of the pattern and then lined these in a second layer with white to create an outline of the pattern.
By turning off the primary layer so that only the second showed, I had a very good gridded outline of the pattern.
I could now overlay the grid onto the twilled copy that I had created with and captured from my program. With the exception of a very minor amount of error that may be attributed to to either a bit of misalignment of the waxed paper template or fabric stretch of the STS tartan sample from which they made the photographic image, the match Is perfect. This conclusively indicates that all of the ratios of the overchecks are identical, an impossibility if the two tartans were not related.
2-22-00
CONCLUSIONS:
1)The tartan pattern recovered from the 1853 grave site in East Texas had also been located in a different form but the exact pattern in Ohio. The two tartan patterns had to have originated from the same source. Since the Bible belonging to Barbara, George Henry Laing's wife, had mentioned that he was buried in one of the family plaids, it is quite logical to assume that the doubled pattern may have been one of these as well. Presently, no connection is known between the Ohio Langs and the Texas Laings. This is significant in light of how well the Texas Laing line has been researched. The fact that through the tartans a connection has been proven between the Laings of Texas and the Langs of Ohio underscores the fact that many Lang families originated as Laings.
2)The Laings of the line to which the George H. tartan belonged were recorded as merchant traders making trips to Charleston South Carolina by 1732. By 1765 the family had become permanently established in South Carolina according to wills and other legal records. There is no evidence that any of the family traveled back to Scotland prior to 1853 to acquire an ancient great tartan once proscription had been lifted. Therefore, the pattern for the tartan found in the 1853 East Texas grave was brought to this country just before or just after English proscription, and only persisted through stubborn tradition. This means that Dr. Gordon Teall was correct in his conclusions resulting from his work with the tartan in 1979 through 1981. The tartan was indeed one which existed before proscription in the mid 1740's, and was what he termed one of the "lost" tartans.
3)The shift of the upper pivot point to the center of the next blue square on the diagonal to form a doubled pattern was nothing more than a very simple modification of the original tartan pattern which existed prior to 1745. The doubled pattern is a valid Laing/Lang tartan as well. The evidence indicates conclusively that it had been woven even though the original tartan from which the dipped one was copied has long since disappeared. This gives us a second valid tartan to register.
4)The use of the program written by Gregory Scott combined with color and pattern analysis techniques has proven to be a very useful and conclusive investigative tool for the comparison of tartans and pattern modification. These techniques might prove useful to other investigators in their efforts to determine conclusively associative or chronologically ordered derivative patterns originating from one or more older ones. In the case of the Laing/Lang tartans it has proven that pride and tradition defied laws, time, distance and hardships with determined persistance to preserve an ancestral pattern long after it had been removed from its homeland.