Buchans of Borthwick

Buried with our Buchans in Newbattle Churchyard are five other people. Four of those are named Brown.  Refresh your memory of the lair records .  Is there a reason why they were buried across the same plots as the Buchans? When I found that three were related to each other, and the stillborn Brown child was also probably part of this family, I began to suspect that there just may be a link. The first child I looked at was named Janet McCree Brown and you can image why her name caught my eye. She was only 18 months old when she died of Croup on 13 April 1889. She was buried on 15 April 1889.  She lived at Hunterfield, as did the two other Browns. Hunterfield is a hamlet about 2 miles from Newlandrig, and is the closest settlement to our village. Janet's parents were revealed to be Abram Brown and Mary Falconer. I then bought this couple's marriage certificate of 31 December 1880. They married in Stobhill, another nearby small village near Gorebridge. I was thrilled to see ...

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...