Throughout Drums of Autumn, Claire, Jamie, and especially Bree must navigate the complicated ties they have with one another while having been born centuries apart. As Bree joins her parents in the North American colonies, the characters discover the challenges and power of family bonds.

At the beginning of the novel, Brianna struggles with ideas about her parents and is unsure about her feelings toward her two fathers, Frank and Jamie. Though Frank raised her, Bree dreams about Jamie and wants to know more about him, speaking to the strength of their bond even before they meet. Similarly, when Bree meets the Murrays at Lallybroch, she feels an immediate connection to this side of her family. She quickly accepts Jenny’s offer to stay at Lallybroch, where she learns how much she has in common with her father and grandmother. As she is leaving Scotland to find her parents in the colonies, Gabaldon describes Bree’s profound emotions, writing, “she had scarcely felt more bereft by her mother’s leaving or her father’s death than by this parting from people and places she had known for so short a time” (677), suggesting that her family ties to Scotland make it home for her.

When Bree meets Jamie, she is immediately struck by the similarities they share and feels eager to get to know him. Jamie, too, shares this feeling when he meets Bree, asking himself, “What a mystery blood was—how did a tiny gesture, a tone of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh?” (826). However, Bree must also contend with the fact that blood alone cannot make relationships run smoothly: She clashes repeatedly with Jamie, whose values are so different from her own, and wrestles with the reality that returning to the future would mean parting permanently from her mother.

Bree also wonders if people can be a family when they are not biologically related. There are several characters in the novel who were raised by people who adopted them, or who raised adoptive children themselves. While Bree considers Frank to be her father as much as Jamie, she wonders if Roger can accept her child as his own, even though she believes he isn’t his biological father. Roger, who was raised by an adoptive father, wants to know more about his biological parents, yet he is willing to accept Jeremiah as his own son. Roger’s blood oath to his son combines the ideas of family being formed by love and commitment as well as by blood, suggesting that it is never blood alone that matters.

The importance of family comes full-circle at the end of the novel with the reunification of families and clans at the festival, where even Gavin Hayes’s long-lost son returns, showing his continued bond with his late father. As the novel ends with the Fraser family all together, it is implied that their bonds will continue to shape their trajectory in the rest of the series.