Our Buchan family stories and more ....

Scottish genealogy, DNA analysis - reconnecting my Buchan families.  Open the READ MORE link for the contents page of this blog. 

My hope for the blog is that anyone descended from George Buchan and Jean Johnson from Borthwick, Midlothian, Scotland might find their family here and want to know more. I hope that the power of DNA to help us reconstruct and reconnect families will be seen, and maybe others will do a DNA test.

Already I have been in contact with relatives in both Australia and around the world - in USA, Scotland, England and South Africa, sharing stories and photographs. Please contact me if we are related through the Buchans. Find the Contact me button on the 'hamburger icon' on the home page.

Acting like an index or contents page, clicking on any post below will take you directly to it. Also use the Search magnifying glass to search for any name, place or topic.


Stories about the families of George and Jean

1. The lost families of Robert Buchan born 1813 Re-connecting my family

2. Robert emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1852 The marriage certificate that started my work

3. Some Buchans Go To Canada  Aitchisons move to a new country

4. The Aitchisons of Haddington   A Scottish branch move east


Genetic Genealogy

1. What is a family-specific match list? How to isolate one family in a match list

2. Our Ethnicity Estimates Compared Just how Scottish is our DNA?

3. Matching patterns DNA inheritance is random

4. A Mystery Buchan Match The power of DNA to find recent ancestors

5. Bottoms Up! A way to find the parents of Janet McRae

6. 'Ask the Wife' Confirming an 'ancestral couple' 

7. Finding Janet McRae in Midlothian Progressing the search for Janet McRae


Our Scottish Background

1. Borthwick Parish The home of the Buchans during the 19th Century

2. Buchans in Old Parish Registers Honing in on our origins

3. Did we come from Dalkeith? A possible path from 1702

4. Gathering Living Buchans   Expanding the Buchan dynasty

5. Clare goes to Borthwick in 2024  Exploring our ancestral places




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Janet 'whaur are ye'?

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Janet McRae is missing - is that even her real name! Janet is the mother of Robert Buchan who arrived in Australia in 1852. She is named on his marriage and death certificates in Australia, but I can not find her in Scotland.  In May I will travel to Edinburgh to do 'local' research into the Buchans and Janet. This elusive ancestor of the Australian Buchans is relevant mostly to her descendants, but the strategy to 'find' her is the same as for any missing ancestor. The task will use DNA + Documentary records and TIME. I began this research in March 2022, during the Skills course of YourDNAGuide run by Diahan Southard. So it is already taking time. Because, to my knowledge, Janet's son Robert is her only child, the DNA for the research must come from Australian Buchans only. The story so far.... I believe that Janet McCray is the name listed as his mother on Robert Buchan’s marriage certificate of 1860, see image below.   His father is listed as Robert Buchan. DNA
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Some Buchans Go to Canada

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 Blog Note - Mark is another collaborator in the study as well as descendant of Mary Buchan. All text is his text unchanged. All images were inserted by me. Click here for the story by another of her descendants, Ronnie Aitchison. Mary Buchan   - April 6, 1867 to February 25, 1924   Mary Buchan was my great grandmother and was my father’s grandmother on his maternal side.  She was born on April 5, 1867 in Haddington, Scotland which is a small town located about 27 kilometres east of Edinburgh and about 20 kilometres west of the North Sea.   Mary’s parents were William Buchan (1838 to 1872) and Annie Pearson (1838 – 1917). William was a grocer, baker and spirit merchant in Haddington and Annie Pearson worked along with her husband in running the successful business. William and Annie had 7 children consisting of 4 sons and 3 daughters with Mary Buchan being the 5 th eldest of her siblings.   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blaeu_-_Atlas_of_Scotland_1654 Haddington was a
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The lost families of Robert Buchan born 1813

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Robert had three separate families, and the distancing of time has led to two of his children being 'lost'. To the world of 2022 there had been knowledge of only the last, legally sanctioned and documented one.  DNA discovered the earlier two children, importantly because these children went onto have large families, and over time, descendants of these large families tested their DNA with Ancestry. Robert's place in the family Robert was the sixth child and fifth son of George Buchan and Jean Johnston born in about 1813 based mostly on his age at death in early January. He is my x3 great grandfather. No-one has yet found a baptism record for him. He lived in close proximity to his Buchan family all his life, with the likely exception of a few years in Edinburgh in the mid 1830s. Most of his life was lived in Borthwick Parish, till about 1860 when his second youngest child Jemima was born in Newbattle Parish. Newbattle is immediately to the north of Borthwick Parish, and was
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A Mystery Buchan Match

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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 allo
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Clare goes to Borthwick in 2024

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Out of no-where came the chance to visit Edinburgh after a holiday in Ireland. Where to visit, who to visit? I contacted all my collaborators in the region, with hopes to catch up to several.  These are my must visit places: Newlandrig - over a century of Buchan occupation. I intend to try to follow all the families living there till 1921 (and beyond). I might get to meet a relative still in residence after 220 years.  National Mining Museum, 0.5km from where Robert Buchan bc1813 died in a mining accident one cold January morning at the age of 74. Naturally I am interested in the museum as well. Newbattle cemeteries old and new (where George and Jean, and their son Robert are buried with probably no headstones). Easthouses in the Parish of Newbattle, where Buchans lived. Dalkeith - possible origin of our Buchan family, where headstones can be found and where the Midlothian Local History archives are located. Edinburgh City - a walking tour, a day in the National Records of Scotland, Le
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Ask the Wife

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A great technique to analyse our DNA We mostly use DNA to confirm an ancestral couple by finding matches to their descendants through a child other than our own ancestor. We can often have a 'surname' bias, with that bias being the paternal surname, so that a match becomes a 'Buchan' match. So we constantly need to remind ourselves that the wife also contributed to the DNA we are detecting in our matches. For our common ancestral couple this means Johnson DNA. Our matches back to this couple are more accurately Buchan+Johnson matches. "Ask the wife' or more correctly 'ask the partner/spouse', means to look for evidence that the DNA of the other parent in a couple is also present in our match list. This can be helpful when one ancestor has multiple wives, and we are unsure which wife was the mother of a match. It can also be the case when a wife has multiple husbands. Increasingly though, people are finding that the wives have other partners than their s
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