Buchans of Borthwick

Janet McRae is missing - is that even her real name! Janet is the mother of Robert Buchan who arrived in Australia in 1852. She is named on his marriage and death certificates in Australia, but I can not find her in Scotland.  In May I will travel to Edinburgh to do 'local' research into the Buchans and Janet. This elusive ancestor of the Australian Buchans is relevant mostly to her descendants, but the strategy to 'find' her is the same as for any missing ancestor. The task will use DNA + Documentary records + TIME. I began this research in March 2022, during the Skills course of YourDNAGuide run by Diahan Southard. So it is already taking time. Because, to my knowledge, Janet's son Robert is her only child, the DNA for the research must come from Australian Buchans only. The story so far.... I believe that Janet McCray is the name listed as his mother on Robert Buchan’s marriage certificate of 1860, see image below.   His father is listed as Robert Buchan. DNA a...

Out of no-where came the chance to visit Edinburgh after a holiday in Ireland. Where to visit, who to visit? I contacted all my collaborators in the region, with hopes to catch up to several.  These are my must visit places: Newlandrig - over a century of Buchan occupation. I intend to try to follow all the families living there till 1921 (and beyond). I might get to meet a relative still in residence after 220 years.  National Mining Museum, 0.5km from where Robert Buchan bc1813 died in a mining accident one cold January morning at the age of 74. Naturally I am interested in the museum as well. Newbattle cemeteries old and new (where George and Jean, and their son Robert are buried with probably no headstones). Easthouses in the Parish of Newbattle, where Buchans lived. Dalkeith - possible origin of our Buchan family, where headstones can be found and where the Midlothian Local History archives are located. Edinburgh City - a walking tour, a day in the National Records of Sco...

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 than their s...

 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 ...