[2] His date of birth is uncertain: he is known to have been under twenty-one in 1709, so was certainly born after 1689, and possibly not long before the death of his father in 1705, when he succeeded as chief of Clan MacFarlane.
[2] He was the author of a number of "collections", among them multi-volume genealogical works.
His Geographical Collections relating to Scotland, a work in three volumes that collected historical, geographical, and folkloristic information dating from 1600 to 1730.
[3] MacFarlane had gathered much of the material in 1748–49;[4] it was published posthumously by the Scottish History Society in 1906, edited by Arthur Mitchell.
[1] The work included a large number of observations recorded by Robert Sibbald, who had attempted a methodical survey of Scotland's parishes.