Born: 26 April, 1932
Died: 24 February, 2020
Aged 87.

Hugh proved chiefships and peerages, and managed not only to locate Ronald Reagan’s paternal ancestry in a tiny Irish village, but also demonstrated that the president enjoyed Scots blood from Paisley.

Mildly interested in genealogy in boyhood, Hugh’s step into serious family research was prompted when his Buchanan grandmother, herself directly descended from a Buchanan of Leny, urged him to find the rightful chief of Buchanan, the chiefly line having died out by 1682.

The task took the better part of 60 years, with ultimate recognition of his efforts given in 2018 when Dr Joseph Morrow, Lord Lyon, accepted the claim of Michael Buchanan of Arnprior and that Ilk to be chief of Buchanan. It was no coincidence that Hugh was rarely seen without a Buchanan tartan tie.

Hugh Millar Peskett was born in Ilford, Essex and educated in Norfolk and at agricultural college in Devon. He would quietly boast of his Scottish forebears, in that he was “only one eighth English, and even that eighth is Cornish”.

Told by a careers adviser that his stammer made him “unemployable”, he successfully sought help from Lionel Logue, speech therapist to King George VI. In later life his impediment would surface when he became excited – a matter almost always concerning a genealogical discovery.

Young Hugh went into sheep farming on Dartmoor, walking up to a dozen miles daily, until an accident with sheep-dip caused a debilitating illness preventing any contact with sheep again.

Ronald Reagan, at that time US president, was his highest profile client. In 1984 Hugh not only traced the president’s paternal great-grandfather to Ballyporeen in County Tipperaray in 1840, he also established presidential Scottish roots through a Wilson marriage of 1807 in Paisley.

A major contributor to many genealogical reference books, he was a long-time editor of Burke’s Peerage, leaving a particularly valuable legacy to researchers of the future in his volume of Burke’s entitled The Kingdom in Scotland.

Snobbery was the antithesis of Hugh’s character – though in the case of a disputed Highland chiefship, he faced pretentiousness as well as research problems.

Source: The Scotsman