Buchans of Borthwick

I have used clustering extensively in my Buchan study, and it illustrates well the principles of using clusters to solve mysteries (or to break down brick walls). Diahan Southard paid me to write about it on her YourDNAGuide blog, and last year she used it at a conference, and gave me permission to use her slides. My ‘nearest’ family history mystery were the parents of my x2 great-grandfather Robert Buchan. My x2 great-grandparents independently emigrated to Australia from Scotland in the 1850s, married in 1860 and had a son Robert in 1863, as well as nine other children. Robert’s wife was Margaret Bain, a lass from the Highlands, and I could trace her family easily. From their marriage certificate I knew Robert’s parents to be Robert Buchan and Janet McCray, but not where they came from. The emigrating Robert was said to be born about 1834 in Edinburghshire, now Midlothian in Scotland. But I could not find his baptism or their marriage anywhere in Scotland. Not did I find any siblin...

The following article was published in The Ancestral Searcher Vol. 49, No. 2, my local family history society: What is a cluster? This is the simplest statement in all of genetic genealogy – a cluster is a group of matches who share DNA with each other. To most people the term genetic network is synonymous. We have been manually clustering in a piecemeal fashion for years, but perhaps only focusing on high cM matches, and those we can place on our tree, or looking for people with known surnames. It was all I thought you could do with DNA, till I found my own mystery ancestral couple and had to learn new methods of manually bringing matches into clusters. An auto-cluster automates the process we have used ever since DNA matches became available, that of bringing together people who share the same bits of DNA, with us and with each other. Auto-clusters, by default, include the important component of “matching with each other”. Who has been gathered into a cluster? The most impo...