Bates51, where are you finding these 'different strands'?
If you got these 'different strands' from online trees, forget about them. Both of them.
Never trust anything you find in online unless it is an image of an original document - and even then be wary because mistakes do happen.
The only online source of the vast majority of Scottish records is Scotland's People
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. That is the only place you can see most original images.
Even if there is only one person in the records who fits the person you are looking for, it is still not safe to assume that they are the right person, because the records are incomplete. Many baptisms and marriages were never recorded or, if they were, the record has not survived.
(I devoted a lot of effort to climbing the wrong tree when I started out, before I got my great-great-grandmother's death certificate and realised that there were two Margaret Davidsons born in the same parish in the same year, only one of whose baptisms was in the parish register. There is no record of the birth or baptism of the other one, who became my great-great-grandmother.)
So you need to look for other evidence, for example did any of the folk you are interested in leave a will? Are there any gravestones? Did they own land, in which case there will be records in the Registers of Sasines.
