Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

Mary Ann White, wife of Ally Alistair MacLeod, on the family croft at Badnaban with her grandson Murdo.

The impressive tombs in the Glasgow Necropolis have many elaborate memorial inscriptions of interest to family history researchers.

PART 2 The main records (#ulink_27f7e379-e1ca-5118-a2af-228ddfca8f43)

Scotland is leading the way in making genealogical records available to the public online. With material from national and many local archives now accessible through the internet, and often very simply searchable as a result, it has never been easier to research Scottish family history. This section guides you through the many types of records that can be searched either online or in the archives, and that will reveal fascinating details about your ancestors’ lives.

CHAPTER 5 General Registration (#ulink_d4717f30-a23c-55e2-ae68-06d38df628fb)

You’ve quizzed your elderly relatives, perhaps found some new ones, and have learned about the places where your known family lived. The next step is to start original research.

General Registration records

Most developed countries have a system of compulsory civil registration (sometimes called General Registration) of births, marriages and deaths. Scottish General Registration started on 1 January 1855 (it began in 1837 in England and Wales, and in 1864 in Ireland, except for Protestant marriages that date from 1845).

Scotland’s registration districts were based on existing parish boundaries, each with a local registrar, who was usually the local schoolmaster or doctor. All births had to be registered with him within twenty days, marriages within three days and deaths within eight days. The local registrars kept their own records, but sent copies to the GROS in Edinburgh, where full indexes were compiled from them all.

An early twentieth-century photo of General Register House in Edinburgh.

As registration districts equated to parishes, it’s easy to search for events taking place where you expect them to be. What may throw you are events being registered in unexpected locations. Some couples married away from their home parishes, children could be born at their mother’s mother’s home, and some people died in hospital, or on holiday, far from their normal home. When searching, you can nominate the registration district you want, but if the search does not work then choose ‘all districts’.

This ‘solution’ can create a new problem – a massive list of possibilities. If you know the area well, you’ll be able to spot local parishes easily: if not, you may be faced with a list of places you’ve never heard of before. ScotlandsPeople helpfully includes the registration district’s county, and the GROS’s official list at www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/famrec/hlpsrch/list-of-parishes-registration-districts.html identifies the county or burgh in which the registration district lies, and its start date. It’s also easy to look them up on www.maps.google.co.uk/.

Access to the records

The records at the ScotlandsPeople Centre have all been digitized under the DIGROS (‘Digital Imaging of the Genealogical Records of Scotland’s people’) project. These images can be viewed (for a fee) on the ScotlandsPeople website or at the ScotlandsPeople Centre, where you can also see images of recent records (births for the last 100 years, marriages for the last 75 and deaths for the last 50) that cannot be viewed on the website.

Alternatively you can visit or contact the local registrar who originally recorded the event – but often you won’t know which to ask, hence the point of using the national indexes.

The digitized images are all you need for genealogy, but for official purposes (such as passports) you can order full certificates from www.gro-scotland.gov.uk.

The miraculous year of 1855

So enthusiastic were the people who introduced General Registration in 1855 that they included many details on their records that had never been recorded before. Sadly, the effort of including so much proved too complicated, so the forms were greatly simplified for 1856, though some extra information was then restored in 1861. These changes are identified below. Bear in mind that any event recorded in 1855 will be more detailed than anything before or after it. If an ancestor died or was married in 1855, you will gain useful extra information. Your ancestor may not have been born in 1855, but censuses may indicate a sibling of theirs who was: if so, it is worth getting their birth record, because it will tell you a lot about your ancestor’s family.

Using the records

By quizzing your family, you will usually be able to draw a family tree starting with a name, ‘Alexander or maybe Angus MacLeod’, followed by their child, with a bit more information say, ‘Malcolm MacLeod, born in 1922’, and then a third generation down, with much more definite information: ‘Flora MacLeod, born on 22 April 1951, Gorbals, Glasgow’. You may think you’ll save money and time if you start with Alexander (or Angus!), but what can you really look for? Starting with Malcolm would be better, as you can look for a birth in 1922, but as you don’t know where Malcolm was born, you’ve no idea where to look. You’re probably not 100 per cent sure that the year 1922 was correct anyway: it may have been calculated from an age at death, and these seldom take into account when in the year people’s birthdays fell, so Malcolm could have been born in 1921 or 1923. Therefore, start with what you know for sure, and seek Flora’s birth certificate. Once you have this, you’ve established a firm foothold, and can work back with confidence.

The birth record is a contemporary source, providing the parents’ names, probably from their own mouths – not half-remembered hearsay, then, but fact. Now, turn to the marriage indexes, seeking their wedding. Marriage records usually state ages of the couple and the full names of all four parents. Thus, following our example, once you’ve worked back from Flora’s birth to her father Malcolm’s marriage, you’ll have a definite age for Malcolm, and know his parents’ full names, including whether the father was really called Alexander or Angus. Sometimes, admittedly, people got details wrong, or lied: if you discover discrepancies, you’ll simply have to widen the period of your next search.

The next step is to seek Malcolm’s birth: if his parents’ names match those given on his marriage record, you’ll know you have the right document.

A special feature of Scottish General Registration records, that is not found in the rest of the British Isles, is that death records state the parents’ names. Admittedly, these can be inaccurate, because the informant of the death may have been born years after the deceased’s parents died. But, usually, this extra feature is very helpful, and deaths should always be sought as a normal part of tracing your

Eleanor Conquer, born 1876 in Haddington (courtesy of the Crowley Family Collection).

Scottish family history. To help you search, all birth, marriage and death records state whether the person’s parents were alive or dead at the time, and in the nineteenth century you can hone the search further using census returns.

Births

Births of boys and girls were indexed separately, though this is of no consequence when searching online. The indexes show:

child’s name.

registration district.

reference number. Twins are not identified explicitly in the records, but can sometimes be spotted by reference numbers that indicate their appearance on the same or adjacent pages as another child in the same district with the same surname.

from 1929 mothers’ maiden names appear, making it much easier to search for all children of a particular couple, or indeed for an illegitimate child (where the child’s surname and mother’s maiden surname will be the same).

Birth certificate for Alexandrina MacLeod, from family papers. She was born at ‘9 hours pm’ on 4 January 1905 (the year is very badly written but can be confirmed from the clearer date of registration, 16 January 1905) at Badnaban, Assynt. The record includes her parents’ date and place of marriage (courtesy of Mrs Moira Crowley).

Birth records always show:

child’s names. If the baby’s name was changed, a diamond-shaped stamp will appear on the birth entry, with a reference to the Register of Corrected Entries (at the ScotlandsPeople Centre and website). Rarely, a birth will be registered before the child’s name has been chosen: these entries should be found at the end of the list of children registered under that surname.

date and time of birth.

address where the child was born.

gender.

father’s name.

father’s occupation.

mother’s name and maiden name.

date of registration. Note that children were occasionally registered twice, especially if they were born some distance from home: this was technically incorrect but can be revealing, especially if the informants were different and gave subtly different information.

informant’s name and relationship (if any) to the child. This will usually be a parent, but may be another close relation, or occasionally a non-relation, depending on circumstances.

The Edinburgh artist Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) painted this depiction of The Bride at her Toilet on the Day of her Wedding, though not every woman would have had such a formal and elaborate wedding day, or have been able to afford the beautiful dresses shown in these old wedding photos.

It would be unwise to draw any inference from a non-relative being the informant.

birth records for 1855 alone show parents’ ages and places of birth, the date and place of the parents’ marriage, the number and gender (but not names) of any children they had already, and whether any of their children had died. This extra information does not appear between 1856 and 1860. From 1861 onwards just the date and place of the parents’ marriage was restored to the records.

The importance of the additional information given in 1855 and to a lesser extent from 1861 onwards is immense. It provides valuable genealogical information on people who lived before 1855, and the marriage details can be linked to pre-1855 OPRs. In all cases where the couple came from somewhere else, the place of the marriage can be invaluable for working out where that was – whether in Scotland or abroad. Many Irish Famine immigrants arrived already married and had children in Scotland: a record of the latter will name the country and often the exact place of marriage back in Ireland.

Marriages

Until 1929 (when the minimum age was raised to 16), boys could marry at 14 and girls at 12 provided they had parental consent. Marriages of such young people were rare, but they really did happen. Many marriage searches fail simply because people don’t search back far enough. If your female ancestor was born in 1850, then she could have married as early as 1862.

The old indexes showed males and females separately, though this is irrelevant when using the computerized indexes. The indexes show:

name of person marrying.