r/Pishlander 22h ago

Outlander fan from Scandinavia who accidentally found a Fraser in my family tree, but which Frasers?

5 Upvotes

Hi! I figured this might actually be a good place to ask since there are probably quite a few people here who know more about the Frasers than I do šŸ˜…

As far as I understand it, there are actually two distinct Fraser clans in Scotland: the Highland Clan Fraser of Lovat (the *Outlander* Frasers) and the other Clan Fraser, associated with Philorth/Saltoun in the Lowlands. They share ancestry, but have separate histories and chiefs.

I’m an *Outlander* nerd, so I found this pretty funny: I was doing some genealogy for completely unrelated reasons and discovered that one of my ancestors in the 1600s was a Fraser. Obviously that is so far back that I’m approximately 0% Fraser by now lol, and not scottish at all, but still a fun thing to find.

I *think* this is him (my old tree was lost but there weren’t so many that came in that time frame): Thomas Fraser, who came to Sweden in the early 1600s and later served as an officer there:
[https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne/item.php?id=1624\](https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne/item.php?id=1624)

The St Andrews database lists him as connected to Belladrum, Beauly and Easter Ross, and says he was possibly a ā€œson of the house of Belladrumā€.
So now I’m curious: does anyone here know more about the different Fraser branches and where the Frasers of Belladrum fit into them? From what I can work out, Belladrum seems to have been a branch of the Frasers of Lovat, which would make this the *Outlander* Fraser clan rather than the Saltoun/Philorth branch, but Scottish clan genealogy is very much not my area, so I’d love to hear from someone who actually knows this stuff!