Hi Mike,

By R-194282, I presume you mean R-BY194284?

I don't know what searching you've done for your 3*great-grandfather's ancestry. I'm expecting you've already looked for records on Scotland's People. Pre-1841 records can be difficult to find, and many births were simply not registered. It can be worth going through the Kirk Session records page by page to try to find something useful. Otherwise, it's normally a case of building up evidence from unrelated sources like the 1830s heads of household indices, estate records, trade directories, company records, etc., to build up a picture of a wider family. It's an approach that works better in rural areas than urban ones (because there are fewer people to interact with), and one that works better with rarer surnames than common ones.

In terms of a possible surname change, yes, that is possible. However, it's worth looking at when you are related. If you look at your Block Tree, you'll see your Forster family comes off at R-BY194284. FTDNA's Discover places at relationship at very roughly 1200 years ago, before the adoption of surnames. The Wallace fmaily all belong to R-BY194284>BY193820>Z23289, and they appear much more closely related to each other than they are to you. So it's likely that your common ancestor never held an inherited surname.

Several R-DF98 lines we find in this part of Scotland seem to be post-Norman arrivals. Obviously it's difficult to be definitive in any single case, but we see suggestions that one or two (e.g. R-A6535) came up with the Norman settlements of David I, particularly with the Bruce family. We see many other lines that show similar timescales of arrival. I'd suggest your ancestors arrived in Britain about 1000 years or so, given the make-up of R-PH589.

Cheers,

Iain.