With time travel in Outlander, trying to figure out how people are related can be tricky. Geillis Duncan and Dougal MacKenzie have a son, but who is he? Is he Roger?
One of the annoying things about time travel is that it can make keeping track of how people are related tricky. That’s certainly the case with Outlander when you consider that there’s a 200-year-old baby. Yes, we’re talking about Brianna.
It leads to a lot of questions about how others are related. One of the biggest questions surrounds Geillis and her son with Dougal MacKenzie. Who was that baby? Is it possible that Roger is Geillis and Duncan’s son?
Roger is not Geillis’s son in Outlander
You can stop worrying about Roger and Brianna being directly related. They are distantly related, but it’s not enough to cause problems genetically. Had Claire remained in the past during and after Culloden, Brianna would have been born in the past. There was no way for Roger to ever be born there.
Roger is not directly related to Geillis, but she is his great-great-however-many-times-grandmother. Likewise, Dougal is Roger’s grandfather many times removed.
Geillis and Dougal’s son is William Buccleigh MacKenzie. We’ve met him in both the books and the show. He’s also known as Buck, and Graham McTavish played the role in the fifth season of the series. It was Buck who turned Roger in as a Regulator and had him hanged. Buck turns up in later books and spends more time with Roger, although the rest of the family doesn’t get a chance to meet him.
Buck doesn’t realize he’s related to Geillis and Dougal, though. As a baby, he was given to one of the MacKenzie families in Cranesmuir. This was the family who had lost a child “to the changelings,” and passing the baby to them was a way to make it right since Claire had interfered with the creatures.