Gathering Living Buchans


We living Buchans are like the leaves emerging from our ancestral roots - still green, sometimes yellowy brown.

My goal from 2022 was to build as comprehensive a family tree for the family of George Buchan and Jean Johnson as was humanly possible. As you may know, online family trees do NOT publish the names or details of any living person.

An example of parts of an online tree on Ancestry displaying living people.


We know of living relatives because we KNOW them personally, relatives share information about the current generations or we find information in places like newspapers and magazines, eg obituaries and anniversary stories. Reunions are a popular place to gather details of living 'leaves'.


In Australia, as is the case in many parts of the world, there are strict privacy laws about vital record information - births, marriages, divorces and deaths. In most states and territories of Australia there is a 100 year embargo on birth information, 75 years on marriage and divorce information and often 50 years on death information. State registries provide indexes to this information only after the required period of time has passed. Also like many parts of the world, such indexes have been published on genealogical databases such as FindMyPast and Ancestry.com. However you need to pay a reasonable cost to purchase a certificate, at least in Australia.

Some parts of the world DO publish information about living people, including some states of USA where such personal information is considered public. Most notable though is ScotlandsPeople which publishes indexes up to the current day, including name and year of event (such as birth, marriage, divorce and death) and the registration district. Although purchasing an instantly downloadable certificate is still restricted to similar time periods, it is possible to order a paper certificate of much later periods than most other parts of the world.


In 2024 I turned to ScotlandsPeople and newspaper archives to extend the Buchan dynasty to the present time. My public tree on Ancestry now has over 40,000 people and several thousand of them are living Buchan relatives. But you won't see their names! 

DNA matching is another good way to find living people as in general most of our matches are still alive. Increasingly they are from the younger generations, often keen to know if they have Viking blood or such like. Sometimes that young match allows me to make the connections back over 100 years to families I already had documented.

Why do I want to build this big Buchan tree? I think to recreate a truth - that many people all around the world can all look back to their connections to one working class couple in rural Scotland at the start of the 19th century. And that is amazing.

Are you one of those young descendants? Welcome to knowing more of our Buchan dynasty.

Contact me if you want to build out your branch. 

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