Buchans of Borthwick

We living Buchans are like the leaves emerging from our ancestral roots - still green, not yet 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 As you may know, online family trees do NOT publish the names or details of any living person.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...

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 DNA 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 ...