The McGehee "clan," not being organized as such, has no official emblems: no clan badge, no plant badge, no tartan, no pipe music. Considering that as an offshoot (according to legend) of the Clan Gregor our family arose in America, it shouldn't be surprising that these traditional Scottish accessories have not been applied to us.

We can't prove our blood ties to Clan Gregor, but in keeping with Highland tradition any family can attach itself to a Clan by mutual consent, and since that consent exists with the MacGregors we McGehees are entitled to wear the MacGregor symbols. Even so, we have a distinct identity of our own, after 350 years in America. I thought, therefore, that we should have a symbol all our own.

Some cousins have suggested a McGehee coat of arms, but a coat of arms cannot be "community property" for an entire family. Such a thing is awarded only to one individual, and is his personal property alone, to be handed down to a single heir, who can then hand it down to his one chosen heir, and so on. If, therefore, a coat of arms had belonged to our original ancestor who came to Virginia around 1650, there would be only one of the thousands of McGehee descendants who could legitimately own that coat of arms. And that person would by the way be the hereditary chieftain of the McGehee branch of Clan Gregor. It's unlikely such a coat of arms exists though, given the circumstances of our ancestor's arrival in America. But if, for example, I were to apply for a coat of arms, I could not share it with the rest of the McGehee clan.

Obviously I, a younger son of a younger son in a cadet branch of Clan McGehee, cannot declare unilaterally any official family emblems except for my own household -- but I can propose one for the entire clan, and what I have proposed is the pine tree emblem that recurs throughout this website.

The reasons for this choice are several. For one, I wished to maintain a continuity with Clan Gregor because of the close blood ties claimed in the family legend. Since Clan Gregor's plant badge is the Scotch pine, I believed that Clan McGehee's plant badge, if it had one, would be the variety of pine tree found in abundance in the area of Tidewater Virginia where our ancestor served his indenture in the 1650s. Another reason I chose the pine tree was the way the McGehees took root in the New World and have flourished, in keeping with the promise in a song attributed to MacGregor warriors by Sir Walter Scott:

While there's leaves in the forest and foam on the river,
MacGregor, despite them, shall flourish forever!

Like a tree with its roots in the soil of Tidewater Virginia, the McGehee clan has grown and spread across America, nourished by freedom our kin back in the "Oulde Countrie" had lost.

Someday, perhaps, we'll have official family symbols established by that hereditary McGehee chieftain -- whoever and wherever he is. When that day comes I will adopt the official symbols. For now, I humbly offer the tree.

[Those of you with McGehee-related websites, who might wish to use the tree icon you may see in your browser when visiting mcgeheezone.com/family, right-click here and choose "Save Link As" or its equivalent, but save it as "FAVICON.ICO". Then upload it into the root public directory of your website -- the one in which your main homepage is located. The icon is for McGehee-related use only.]