Scottish Records
Civil
Registration began in 1855 in Scotland. However, this site also has Church
Registers from 1553. You can view census images 1841-1911. Remember you could
see transcriptions on FMP but couldn’t view the images?
You can
search for free but you need to pay to see an image or purchase a certificate.
Once you get
back to the Church Registers you can get a fair amount of information just from
the indexes.
On the main
page click on Advanced People Search.
On the next
page, you will notice that Statutory Registers is already ticked, this is
always the default and you will need to select the record type you want to search
to change it.
For now, we
are going to search the Statutory Registers.
Click on the
type of record you want to search. Our example will be births. You will be
prompted to Register or Log In, this is free.
I’ve entered
these details.
We get 2 results.
The one I’m
interested in is Charles Stewart Lauder, at this point I ordered the
certificate which cost £12.00. From this I found his parent’s
names, James Charles Lauder and Elizabeth Mary Jack.
Go back to
the Advanced Search screen, this time search marriages.
The results:
In this
instance, we are offered to view the image. For this you purchase credits.
As you can
see I’ve paid to view the image, this is what you get.
From this we
get both parent’s names, mother’s maiden name and their father’s occupation:
James Keddie
Lauder (Farmer) & Jessie Waters
Robert Jack
(Engineer) & Elizabeth Watson
I’m going to
continue down the JACK line, but I’m going to skip a few images and just give
you a couple’s names and their date of marriage, to show you how much
information you can get from the Church Register Index.
Tip: This is my rule of thumb for
calculating dates of birth from wedding dates. This works 95% of the time. Just
deduct 20 years from the marriage date. Most people married around the age of
20. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but you just need to expand
the years searched.
Thomas Jack
married Jane Beattie 16 Dec 1807 Eckford, Roxburgh(shire), Scotland.
Go back to
Advanced Search page and click Church Registers then select Births/Baptisms.
I’ve selected Eckford as I know this
is where the marriage took place. If I get no results or only a few, I would go
back to the search parameters and change the place to all.
Result:
Because the
index usually includes the parent’s names and the mother’s maiden name, you can
be fairly sure that you have the correct children for the couple you search for
in this way.
If you don’t
get any results, you should try the other two churches per the search screen.
Other Scottish Records.
Scotland’s
People is the main web site to go to for “official” records, there are other
web sites you can use. These were part of the handouts at 2017's RootsTech
Conference.
These links
will take you to a pdf document showing links to other web sites.
Lesser known
databases
Finding
Inheritance Property & Land
Scottish
Poor Law
Finally,
this link will take you to a pdf document that explains how to use Family
Search to find Scottish Records.
Next week we
will cover Irish Records.
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