APPENDIX 5 - A NOTE ON SOURCESThe
resources available to an American attempting to trace his family in Scotland
inevitably shape how that tracing comes out. The resources are numerous, but often cover only a specific period of
time or a specific area. For
example, in this work, information will appear more exact for the 1840s than the
1900s simply because the former is more readily accessible than the latter. The
oldest records of births, deaths and marriages are parish registers, records of
the Established Churches in Scotland. They
can date from as early as the 1500s, but generally commence in the late 1700s. The LDS Church, as part of its continuing genealogical project, has
microfilmed those records for most Scottish parishes through the year 1854. A computerized alphabetical index to these registers, also put together
by the LDS, extends through to 1871. Both
these new (available only since the 1980s) sources are on microfilm and can be
rented through the LDS library in Utah. The
significance of the year 1854 is that, the next year (1855), the United Kingdom
government began keeping governmental records of births, deaths and marriages;
the equivalent of what Americans would know as birth, death and marriage
certificates. The U.K. government
also compiled a yearly alphabetical index of these records. These indexes give the name of the party or parties, the parish the event
took place in, and the certificate page or number of the record. Both the indexes and the original records are available for rent through
the LDS. In addition, I have
ordered copies of certificates direct from the U.K. There is no overall index (covering multiple years) to these
certificates, which makes them difficult to deal with. For example, to find the birth record of Charles Allardice, born about
1899, I had to rent five different films of indexes, to cover 1897-1901, take
the names and certificate numbers of all Charles Allardices born in Dundee in
those years, and then order the certificates from Scotland one by one until I
found the correct one. As can be
seen, this process can be both expensive and time- consuming. For
these types of records, the indexes only show the names of the principals
involved; for marriage, the names of the husband and wife; for births and
deaths, only the names of the born and deceased. The original certificates usually contain far more; names of the parents
of the principals, their occupations, addresses, age, etc. A third
major source of information is the British censuses, taken at ten year intervals
since 1841. The census entries for
1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891 have been opened to the public and,
again, are available on microfilm through the LDS. The LDS has privately compiled an index to the 1881 census, which
microfilm has been of great help in research. For other years, to search for a person, I had to rent the census of the
entire town/ city/ parish where that person was assumed to live, then go through
the handwritten enumeration schedules, line by line, trying to find the right
name(s). These census schedules,
organized by parish and, within the parish, by residence, show street address,
names of residents at that address, age and occupation of the residents, and
where they were born. Outside
Scotland, the Scottish records readily accessible and of practical use peter out
around 1900. After that date the
censuses have not been made public, and the birth/death/marriage indexes contain
so many duplicate names as to make a search for a particular person of that name
nearly impossible. To go beyond
1900 and flesh out the more contemporary family tree would require a month's
stay in Scotland, poking around old cemeteries and haunting the Public Record
Office in Edinburgh. One of these
days I hope to find the time to do so. Until
then, this essay will have to serve. |
