PESKETT, Hugh Millar (1932-2020), eminent genealogist and establisher of peerage claims
Richard R
Obit from the Telegraph of 14 March 2020:
EXTRACT
Hugh Peskett, genealogist described as the ‘Sherlock Holmes of the family tree’ – obituary
He traced President Reagan's Irish and Scottish ancestors and established claims to long-dormant peerages and clan chiefships
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….
The Reagans, Peskett claimed in 1984, were also descended from Donnchuan, brother of the 11th-century 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….
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 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….
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….
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….
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
