Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

It’s always worth following up any new leads you find in family history, so I investigated Catherine further, finding her marriage to Robert Conquer in 1868 and her appearance in the 1881 census with a hitherto unknown sister, Charlotte. Investigating Charlotte produced a real surprise, for in the 1861 census she was living in Edinburgh with her Irish-born parents, John and Catherine: before then, we had no idea that they had come over from Ireland too.

When Charlotte married in 1868, John and Catherine were both alive, but neither were found in the 1871 census. This narrowed down the period when they must have died, and we found Catherine’s death reported in 1869. This listed her parents, Hubert Kelly, a crofter, and Ellen, née Denny. These were Sissy’s great-great-grandparents, and would have been born in the late 1700s: they had probably never set foot in Scotland, and most likely don’t appear in any Irish records either – yet through this piece of lateral genealogy their names have been found again.

The 1861 census entry revealing the unexpected presence in Scotland of the Irish-born John and Catherine Hunt.

Margaret Hunt Conquer

Minor Registers

These tend to record people who were born, married or died abroad. If you cannot find what you want in normal General Registration, look in the minor registers – you never know. On ScotlandsPeople, select ‘minor records’ from the drop-down county menu. If the person you expect to find does not appear, try the equivalent events-abroad records of the Registrar General in London (that effectively cover ‘the British’): these are indexed at www.findmypast.com.

The GROS Minor Records include:

Air Register from 1948 of births (where one parent normally lived in Scotland), and deaths (of people who normally lived in Scotland) on British aircraft anywhere in the world.

Consular Returns of birth and death from 1914 and marriage from 1917 registered with British consuls, for people ‘of Scottish descent or birth’.

Foreign Returns (1860-1965): births of children of Scottish parentage, ‘based on evidence submitted by the parents and due consideration of such evidence’ and marriage and deaths of Scottish subjects.

High Commission Returns (from 1964) of births and deaths of children ‘born of Scottish descent in certain Commonwealth countries’.

Marine Register (from 1855) of births on British merchant ships at sea, where one of the child’s parents was usually resident in Scotland, and deaths of people normally resident in Scotland: and also deaths of Royal Navy and Royal Marine personnel (including Reservists) during wartime.

Armed Services: births include Army Returns of ‘births of Scottish persons at military stations abroad’ 1881-1959; Service Departments Registers from 1959 for births of children of Scottish residents in the armed forces; marriages of Scots serving at military stations abroad; Service Returns of deaths of Scottish persons at military stations abroad (1881-1959); Service Departments Registers of deaths ‘outside the United Kingdom of persons ordinarily resident in Scotland who are serving in or employed by HM Forces, including families of members of the Forces (from 1959)’; War Returns of deaths of Scottish soldiers in the Boer War (1899-1902); Scottish soldiers and sailors in the First World War, except for commissioned officers, who are included in the First World War deaths at TNA, Kew

An army recruitment poster for the First World War showing young men having a wonderful time. There was no hint that the recruits might well end up in a foreign grave. The records of the unfortunate dead are part of the GROS’s ‘Minor Records’.

Army deaths

Many Scots served in the British Army (see pp. 104-8), and many died on active service.

War memorials are found all over Scotland. This one, at Uig, Lewis, includes the tragic deaths of servicemen on the Iolaire. On 1 January 1919, the ship was carrying servicemen home to Lewis after the First World War when it struck a rock and sank just outside Stornoway harbour, drowning 205 of them within a stone’s throw of safety. Scarcely a family in Lewis was unaffected. In Uig, we were told of an old lady who had died only recently, whose father conceived her before he left for the war. He survived the horrors of the trenches, but then drowned before he ever held his little daughter.

War graves of all British service personnel can be found through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (www.cwgc.org), and you can also look at local war memorials and in published Rolls of Honour.

These are not just names. James Patrick Crowley, born in Falkirk in 1890, was educated at St Aloysius’s College and St Mungo’s Academy, Glasgow, before becoming a schoolmaster on Barra, where he wanted to help the local children. Jim volunteered for the 16th Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry as a private. He sent this postcard to his parents in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, telling of an early and unexpected danger he encountered:

‘We had just left Kinghorn [Fife] when there was a terrible whistling & we were backed into the station, or rather a siding. We were scarcely there when an Express thundered past – right across where we had been just a minute & a half before…Fondest love & pray for me, Jim.’

Jim was sent on the Dardanelles Campaign and, as this old photocopied newspaper cutting reveals, he was killed in action on 16 August 1915. The Helles Memorial on the Gallipoli Peninsula commemorates Jim and the 20,834 other British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in the campaign.

(and indexes at www.findmypast.com) and Scottish soldiers and sailors in the Second World War.

Search Tips

Try to cross-refer between General Registration and census records. If censuses reveal an event that may have been recorded in that special year of 1855 then make it a priority to seek the 1855 record.

Searching for the birth of someone with a common name may produce a long list of possibilities. For events from 1901 back, you can try to narrow the search by using the place of birth given in census returns.

If an ancestor was born in the rather dry period 1856-60, see if a sibling was born in 1855 or from 1861 onwards, as then you will learn details of the parents’ marriage.

Events (especially births) taking place late in one year might be recorded at the start of the next.

When calculating years of birth from ages stated later in life, don’t forget that the year changed each January. For example, you’d think someone who died in 1950 aged 50 was born in 1900, but if they were aged 50 when they died on 7 June 1950 they could have been born any time between 7 June 1900 and 8 June 1899, so you’d need to search in both those years.

Some ages were not given accurately, even by the people concerned. Always be prepared to widen your search by a few years either side.

Occupations could change, but usually not by much. If the father of someone marrying in 1950 was a factory manager, and he appears on a 1922 birth certificate as a junior clerk, then you can see that the clerk could have been promoted to factory manager. If, however, you find an implausible jump from, say, road sweeper to army officer, then you may have found the wrong person.

However, people tended to elevate their parents’ status, especially after death, so a ship’s mate could easily be described by their proud descendants as a ship’s captain. Fortunes could go down as well as up, so an apparently implausible change from, say, gentleman farmer to road sweeper, could be explained by someone falling on hard times (or the bottle!). You need to judge each case on its own merit.

Besides seeking Scottish death records for the useful details they provide on parents, it is good practice (and interesting) to discover your ancestors’ deaths anyway. It completes their stories. Sometimes, discovering a death may alert you to a mistake you’ve made: if the supposed ancestor died before your genuine ancestor got married, for example, you’ll know you have found the wrong person and should return to the drawing board.

If you find several possible births for your ancestor, you can try to ‘kill off’ the red herrings by seeking infant deaths, for many children died in their first few years. This might just leave one possibility, hopefully the right one.

Married women’s maiden names and surnames are given in the death indexes, making their deaths easier to seek than their husbands’.

You may find conflicting information on different documents. If so, consider which is more likely to be accurate. Say someone’s marriage and death records give different details about their parents. Which is more likely to be correct? The answer is the marriage, because the person themselves will have stated who their parents were, whereas on the death certificate the details will have been given by someone less likely to know the truth.

Parents’ names given in death records could be inaccurate or wrong because the informant was a child or grandchild of the deceased and may never have met the deceased’s parents. Even if they had, they may just have known them as ‘granddad’ and ‘grandma’, so the potential for getting details wrong was enormous. If the parents are given as ‘unknown’, this may mean that the deceased person never knew his parents, but more likely that the informant just didn’t know.

The Scotlands People indexes can be slightly inaccurate and occasionally omit entries. If an entry that should definitely be there is not, it sometimes pays to search the original records at the ScotlandsPeople Centre (or try again later as the computer system is sometimes faulty).

Not all events were recorded, but the incidence of non-recorded events in Scotland is said to be low. If you do not find what you expect, always think of variant spellings, or of widening the period or geographical area you are searching.

When you find an entry that is right, print it out or at least make full notes of everything on the record, down to the addresses and witnesses’ names: you never know when something like that will appear on another document and prove a vital clue.

www.sctbdm.com, the Scotland BDM exchange, is a lucky dip index to some birth, marriage and death information extracted from the original records. If you find an entry of interest you can email the submitter to ask for full details.

For 1855-75, most Scottish births and marriages are indexed on www.familysearch.org, which can be a useful (and free) shortcut to the ScotlandsPeople indexes.

Mary Queen of Scots (1542-87). Names chosen by the royal family were promptly copied at all levels of society. Mary’s own mother was also called Mary (of Guise), and she was attended by several Scottish noblewomen also all bearing the name Mary. In the ballad ‘The Four Marys’ they are remembered as: ‘There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton And Mary Carmichael and me.’

Tracing living relatives

This process involves using the records in reverse, working down from a known ancestor rather than up from you. Start by seeking the births of other children of the couple from whom you want to trace down.

You can then jump forward and seek their deaths, inspecting death records of people of the right age to see which has the correct parents’ names.

Once you have the right death record, you can see if they had married, and if so seek the marriage record and then search for the births of children (a short-cut would be if the informant of the death was one of the person’s children).

Up to 1901, use censuses to find out who people’s children were. From 1928 onwards, mothers’ maiden names are given in the birth indexes, so you can easily spot all the offspring

Naming difficulties

ScotlandsPeople offers the option of using Soundex, a system that groups surnames together by common groups of consonants. It’s a good way of alerting you to possible variants, but it will not reveal all possibilities, and it is not based on specialist knowledge of surnames: the possible variants that it throws up may never have been used in real life.

Soundex helps by bringing together surnames starting M’, Mc and Mac. Some confusion can be caused by alternative Christian names (Jane might be recorded as Janet, Alexander as Alex or Allistair, William as Wm) so besides using Soundex for the forename, try simply keying in the initial letter: this will pick up any names starting with it.