Buchans of Borthwick

No definite records identify the parents of George Buchan and Jean Johnston. Both were born when baptism records did exist in the parishes of Midlothian, but an unknown proportion of baptisms were never recorded. Similarly a marriage record in Midlothian has not been found. Perhaps it was an irregular marriage, made outside the auspices of any church. I know many people have looked for these records over the years. Nevertheless Buchan is not a particularly common name in Midlothian, in contrast to Johnston. As part of looking into Buchans born throughout Scotland (see Buchans in Old Parish Registers ), I paid particular attention to the those families geographically close to Borthwick.  Below is a table noting the number and time span of baptisms of Buchans in Midlothian in the Old Parish Registers. The top 6 parishes are largely Edinburgh and its associated parishes and ports, and Inveresk is of course coastal. Apart from these 17 parishes, there are 20 parishes with absolutely no...

How to understand and work with matches The following table shows how we match each other.  The creamy beige section reflects the Australian Buchans, and with pink Helen and Sheila, displays descendants of Robert born 1813. Those in bold in the beige section are descendants of my great grandfather Robert George Buchan born 1863. Vicki and Kathryn (KJL) descend from two sisters of Robert George. The green section reflects descendants of George born 1802. The blue section reflects Paul as currently the sole representative of descendants of Isabella born 1805. What it shows, as expected, is that our closest relatives have the highest cM matches. But even within a tight genetic link of shared x2 great grandparents - the Robert who emigrated to Australia - we are not always matching. Peter does not match either Vicky or Kathryn. Julie matches Kathryn at 166cM but I only match her at 31cM. Pat, Kathryn, Ron, Paul and Sheila are all in the closest generation to George and Jean ....

The Buchans lived in the small village of Newlandrig. Rev Thomas Wright, in 1839 in the second Statistical Account of Scotland writes: Newlandrig  is a much older village than Dewarton, but it lies much out of the common thoroughfare, and has little connected with it to awaken a spirit of animation or of enterprise. Several of the houses are at present untenanted, and some are falling into entire decay. A considerable number of old people take up their residence in it. The entire number of the population is about 100 inhabitants. [Unless other wise noted, all quotes in this post are from this report found here ]. I'm not sure how up-to date Rev Wright was, but there were 130 people enumerated in the 1841 census, and most were children or young adults [see end of post for a list]. Despite his thoughts that it was a run down place, no less than eight people of independent means were living there in 1841. All but one of these people were born outside Midlothian, that is, they chose to...

In this post I tabulate the number of Buchans in the baptism, marriage and burial records in the Old Parish Records for each county. These records are found on  ScotlandsPeople  and the indexes are free to view. The purpose of doing this comparison was to explore where the Buchan families were distributed across Scotland and ask whether this might inform thinking about our Buchan origins.  Old Parish Registers "The Old Parish Registers (OPRs) comprise the records of births and baptisms, banns and marriages and deaths and burials kept by individual parishes of the Established Church (Church of Scotland) before the introduction of civil registration in 1855. The parish minister or the session clerk usually assumed responsibility for maintaining the registers, but since there was no standard format employed, record keeping varied enormously from parish to parish and also from year to year. As a result, the information may be sparse, unreliable and difficult to read. The...