Hugh Peskett
‘Sherlock Holmes of the family tree’ who traced President Reagan’s Irish and Scottish ancestry
HUGH PESKETT, who has died aged 87, was known as the “Sherlock Holmes of the family tree” with an expertise in Scottish heraldry and a special line in investigating claims to ancient titles.
He hit the headlines, however, in the early 1980s when he traced President Ronald Reagan’s Irish and Scottish ancestry, after American researchers had tried and failed to find any leads.
Peskett established that Reagan’s paternal great-grandfather Michael Reagan had emigrated during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s from Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary, settling in Illinois in the mid-1850s. Reagan’s maternal great-great-grandparents, meanwhile, had been married in Paisley, Scotland, in 1807 and had left in 1832 for Illinois, where Reagan’s parents, Nelle and Jack Reagan, married in 1904.
The Reagans, Peskett claimed in 1984, were also descended from Donnchuan, brother of the 11thcentury Irish King Brian Boru, through his son Riagain. Ronald Reagan, moreover, was a direct male descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, and related to most of the crowned heads of Europe, including Queen Elizabeth II.
Peskett’s findings led to the Reagans taking time off from official visits to make pilgrimages – in 1984 to Ballyporeen, where Peskett presented his research to the President in person, and in 1991 to Paisley.
There were, though, limits to Reagan’s enthusiasm for tracing ancestral links. He had asked Peskett to look into whether he and Donald Regan, his White House Chief of Staff, were part of the same family. But in 1987, after Regan resigned after falling out with Nancy Reagan, Peskett revealed that he had been asked to drop his research.
Hugh Millar Peskett was born on April 26 1932 at Ilford, Essex. He traced his family history on his maternal grandmother’s side back to the Buchanans of Mull, and on his father’s side to a claimed connection to a family which got its Coat of Arms in 1575.
Later generations of Pesketts had slipped down the social ladder somewhat, as Peskett revealed in 2013 on a visit to an exhibition event for the television programme Who Do You Think You Are? when he came face to face with a photograph of his grandfather, Ernest Peskett, outside his dairy shop in Ilford.
Peskett was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, in Norfolk, where he practised falconry. In a letter to The Times in 2011, he revealed that he had been a patient of Lionel Logue (George VI’S speech therapist) on account of his childhood stammer: “A careers adviser told me that I was ‘unemployable’. ”
His stammer would disappear, almost miraculously, in later life after an operation, but in the meantime he studied at Seale-hayne Agricultural College at Newton Abbot, Devon, and began his career as a farm manager, before buying his own sheep farm on Dartmoor which he roamed on horseback.
Peskett became a genealogist in the 1960s after his Buchanan grandmother urged him to find the rightful clan chieftain, the last chief having died without a male heir in 1681.
As his interest in family history grew into a profession – he eventually gave up the farming – Peskett developed an expertise in medieval Gaelic and Latin to research Buchanan lineage back to 1370.
He established references in more than 300 documents from around the world before verifying the claims of John Michael Baillie-hamilton Buchanan, the manager of an estate near Callander, Stirlingshire.
In 2018 the Lord Lyon King of Arms, the head of Lyon Court which regulates Scottish heraldry, formally upheld a petition for him to assume the chiefship of the clan.
Peskett worked at various times for Debrett’s and Burke’s, finally as editor in chief of Burke’s Peerage.
Some of his greatest triumphs came in 1986-7, when he proved no fewer than three claims for dormant peerages – for the titles Annandale, Borthwick and Dunmore.
His research into the Earldom of Annandale and Hartfell, which had been unsolved for 190 years after the last earl died childless, involved tracing the second Earl’s younger brother, a Jacobite exile, across Europe in the 1690s and early 1700s, a mission crowned with success in 1985 when Patrick Hope-johnstone was confirmed as the new Earl and a member of the House of Lords.
Peskett’s proof of the succession of the 23rd Lord Borthwick, a title which had become dormant in 1910, involved research in the medieval archives of the Avignon popes, though he unearthed the key documents in the case in a cardboard box beneath the billiard table at Crookston House on the Borthwick estate.
In 1986 the Lord Lyon ruled that John Borthwick, a sheep farmer, had proved his right to the title and he duly took his place in the upper house.
Peskett also produced evidence that Al Capone’s former jockey was rightfully the 13th Dunbar of Mochrum Baronet; identified a Canadian-born former Coal Board employee as chief of Clan Arthur; and upheld the claims of Richard Oliphant, a 49-year-old company secretary, to be head of Clan Oliphant in preference to the claims of Laurence Philip Kington Blair of Ardblair and Gask, who had been the public face of the family.
As well as his work on President Reagan’s lineage, he looked into the ancestry of presidents George HW and George W Bush, tracing their roots to Messing, Essex, to John Bush, a landowner whose persecuted son, Reynold, crossed the Atlantic in 1631 to start a new life in Massachusetts. Further back, he traced their lineage to William the Conqueror.
He was surprised, however, to receive an unenthusiastic letter from the White House: “The family didn’t like my research as it made them look too aristocratic, when they wanted to appear like Texan ranchers,” he observed.
Peskett was often called upon to comment when matters of genealogy and succession made the news.
In 2010, during a public debate about the 1701 Act of Settlement, Peskett said that he had worked out that, without the Act, the current heir to the British throne would be Uberto Omar Gasche, great-grandson of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, a divorced dog breeder and photographer living in Rome.
Hugh Peskett is survived by his second wife, Pamela, by a son, and by two stepdaughters and a stepson.
Hugh Peskett, born April 26 1932, died February 24 2020