A little bit of Scotland has intruded

For the bloggers reading this. I had attached a Comment to George Buchan (the patriarch), on my Ancestry tree, saying if anyone was interested in this family why not read my blog. Click here.

Well a woman in Scotland did just that and said it was a ‘great read’. So she has a great-great grandmother reputedly from Ireland but with no documentary proof, and raised in Midlothian. Louise is very well organised, she has clustered all her 16 family lines. In this particular line relating to Elizabeth there is one match - her father’s cousin. All the other lines have 40+, one has 170 matches.

Louises’s code for when a line is verified in terms of matches going back to a couple is a series of differently colored DNA strands. The following is for the husband of the uncertain ancestor, Elizabeth. I like this imagery.

So she has sent me her DNA match list, her tree. She has a Buchan ancestor, probably male, who is showing up within a 42 strong mystery cluster. I do not match her, but some of her matches are mentioned in my blog.

The best bit - she lives in Dalkeith, where I am staying 5 days after Ireland.

As I see it, Elizabeth is not from Ireland, though her adoptive parents might very well be. Allegedly they had no child for six years after the marriage, then ‘Elizabeth’ in 1858, then no other children till twins in 1861. The twins both died young.

I feel the way forward is to find another cluster in her unknown paternal matches who does not match her other six paternal lines. She has a group labeled ‘unknown paternal’, and indeed one marked ‘matches with (cousin)’, so the thing to do will be to go through each group finding people who do not match the other six lines.

Having found the other cluster, the same principle applies. Look for their common ancestral couple, or individual. Then work towards the present day to identify who could have been a parent to Elizabeth born about 1858.

So her parents might be a father - born 1800-1843 and a mother - born 1818-1843.

George Buchan and Catherine Scougall

This couple married in 1827 and had eleven children between 1827 and 1842. Ten children had families and two had illegitimate children, although the father was acknowledged. All but one of the 13 or so matches she can link back to the Buchans are through George Buchan b1802, making his children the most likely to be Elizabeth’s parent.

Any of the children could have parented an illegitimate child, including the youngest Isabella aged 16.

Louise has already checked for matches to each of the known spouses of these two individuals, without success. Not surprising in that a child adopted out in 1858 is unlikely to be the product of a married couple.