A Mystery Buchan Match

I generally contact matches hoping to learn more about Buchan connections. Sometimes people don't have any information to share. This was the case with Janice. She matches Pat at 39cM, Julie at 13cM, Marnie at 16cM and Ronnie at 13cM.

But Janice only knows her mother's and her maternal grandmother's names. So of course she doesn't know if any Buchan match is on her mother's or her father's side. 

Ancestry's release of assignment to either Parent1or Parent2 based on matching signatures and then refined by people allocating a match to either Father or Mother landed just as I offered to help Janice find her father.  Suddenly, we could quickly identify who was on either side of the blanket. However there was a caveat for Janice - her parents share the same ethnicity - Lowland Scotland, Northern England and Northern Ireland.

Fortunately her half nephew on her mother's side had done a DNA test - he was her highest match at 1216cM. Anyone matching him was allocated a Maternal group. Anyone not matching him was a Paternal Group. Her top closest matches are below, and are not helpful. The unlinked tree of 7 people is entirely privatized.



As I worked through her entire list, when I came to Pat at 39cM she became Group 5 - being the fifth group when a Paternal match was not already allocated. In Group 5 there are 27 people, and 13 were Buchan descendants already known to me (and on the latest DNA chart):

Pat (39), Julie, Marnie, Rosemary (all Robert's line), 

Ronnie, MalloryB, JessicaB, JohnG, DavidP, historybuff727, AndrewB (all George's line)

NaomiH, SeanT (Isabella's line).

I have identified one new match HunterF (31cM) from George's line. He also matches Ronnie and Paul.

But I have also found one match dating back to Walter Buchan b1742 in Dalkeith - AngelaH. I will be checking all our match lists to see if she turns up. Again all of Angela's pedigree needs to be checked for other ways she can related to Janice - but she is in the Buchan group.

JohnG also appears in Group 4, as well as man named A Whipple who also appears in both groups. I suspect the connection will be in USA as John's family lands there, and there are no Whipples on the Old Parish Registers, only one in the early 1900s (and he is an Englishman), and less than a dozen in the latter part of the 20th century.  

How does this help Janice?

I was able to create 13 groups. Her two highest paternal matches are named Hunter, but neither has a tree, or yet replied to me. Their cM amounts suggest 2C, half 2C or half 1C1R.

Group 1 (20 people) - Hunter, Gilruth (common surnames within the group)

Group 2 (79 people) - Hynd, Dryburgh, also Johnston, Easton, Crawford. I have found the marriage between a Hynd and a Dryburgh couple. From their ancestor's lines I can link about 12 matches - so this is the correct family line. A couple in this family should be the ancestors of Janice

Group 3 (6 people) - due to a match being in two groups, this group links to Hynd family

Group 4 (13 people) - due to a match being in two groups, this group links to the Buchan family, including the name Whipple (rare in Scotland)

Group 5 (27 people) - Buchan family, I think from George Buchan b1802. One marriage in Fife between Buchan and Hynd (on a line from William, George Buchans's brother) but I am struggling to see the actual connections. Other common names Nye

Group 6 (9 people) - matches into Hunter family

Group 7 (21 people) - matches into Gilruth family - common names are Skilling+Cochrane line, Elliot 

Group 8 (2 people) - only one tree

Group 9 (22 people) - matches into Dryburgh family

Group 10 (8 people) - matches into Hunter family

Group 11 (7 people) - McDougall family

How the matches and groups look graphically:


And how such an array of matches might translate into a pedigree:


So this is where I have been spending most of October. I will need to return to documenting the descendants of the Dalkeith Buchans before I embark on trying to find these potential matches in all our match lists.

By February 2023 the mystery was solved. Janice belongs to the George b1802 family. Although the graph immediately above is an interesting way to think about what the clusters might mean, it was utterly wrong. The names of her highest matches were BIG red herrings. People with the names Hunter and Hynd had only married into the key families in her pedigree. 




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