Buchans of Borthwick

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 th...

 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. Hadtyntoun on this 1654 map   https://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Contributed by Ronnie Aitchsion Blog note - Ronnie was the first of my collaborators to offer a story for this blog. The words are unchanged from his text. All images have been inserted by me. Mary Buchan, my grandmother was born in 1867 In Haddington, she was the second daughter of William Buchan and Annie Pearson. William was a grocer living in Haddington by this time, but had started his career as a groom, progressed to being a mason at the time he married Annie and between them they had three children. St Mary's Haddington, the largest parish church in Scotland William was the middle child of a large Borthwick family, his father was George Buchan and his mother Catherine Scougall they had ten children. George was a wright (probably a wheelmaker) a trade learned from his father also George Buchan who is the earliest Buchan in my tree. They were clearly a closely related family as Catherine’s father was also a wright in the same area. Mary Buchan married my grandfather, James Ait...

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

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 ...

No definite records identify the parents of George Buchan and Jean Johnston. Both were born when baptism records did exist in the parishes of Midlothian, but an unknown proportion of baptisms were never recorded. Similarly a marriage record in Midlothian has not been found. Perhaps it was an irregular marriage, made outside the auspices of any church. I know many people have looked for these records over the years. Nevertheless Buchan is not a particularly common name in Midlothian, in contrast to Johnston. As part of looking into Buchans born throughout Scotland (see Buchans in Old Parish Registers ), I paid particular attention to the those families geographically close to Borthwick.  Below is a table noting the number and time span of baptisms of Buchans in Midlothian in the Old Parish Registers. The top 6 parishes are largely Edinburgh and its associated parishes and ports, and Inveresk is of course coastal. Apart from these 17 parishes, there are 20 parishes with absolutely no...

How to understand and work with matches The following table shows how we match each other.  The creamy beige section reflects the Australian Buchans, and with pink Helen and Sheila, displays descendants of Robert born 1813. Those in bold in the beige section are descendants of my great grandfather Robert George Buchan born 1863. Vicki and Kathryn (KJL) descend from two sisters of Robert George. The green section reflects descendants of George born 1802. The blue section reflects Paul as currently the sole representative of descendants of Isabella born 1805. What it shows, as expected, is that our closest relatives have the highest cM matches. But even within a tight genetic link of shared x2 great grandparents - the Robert who emigrated to Australia - we are not always matching. Peter does not match either Vicky or Kathryn. Julie matches Kathryn at 166cM but I only match her at 31cM. Pat, Kathryn, Ron, Paul and Sheila are all in the closest generation to George and Jean ....