Why your Scottish ancestor might not be in the parish registers
Before civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced in Scotland in 1855, the only record of major life events for most people were the records of baptisms, marriages and burials kept by churches. The Church of Scotland also concerned itself with the moral behaviour of parishioners, the education of children, and the provision of relief to the poor. The keeping of parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials (known as the Old Parish Registers or OPRs) was required from the beginning of the protestant Church of Scotland, which was formed during theReformation of 1560 when Scotland, following on from England, broke from the Catholic Church of Rome. Not all parishes complied, however, so not all Scottish parishes have OPRs going back so far: many didn’t start keeping a proper Parish Register until the 1700s or in a few cases early 1800s.
Each parish had a Minister and a number of Elders who formed the Kirk Session. The Session Clerk was responsible for writing up both the Registers and the Kirk Session Minutes, which meant he had to be able to read and write, hence it was common for the session clerk to also be the schoolmaster.
There are many reasons, however, why it’s difficult to find specific ancestors in the OPRS, and difficult to prove an entry for someone of the same name is actually your ancestor.
Problems with lack of detail in the OPRs
As well as a degree of non-compliance with the need to keep a Parish Register, there was also little guidance given as to what information the registers should contain. The amount of detail therefore varied by Parish and by Session Clerk.
Often there is little more than names and dates, although baptism entries usually state the father’s name and often give the mother’s name too, including her maiden surname. In some parishes, the parents’ place of residence and occupation of the father is provided.
Marriages don’t give much more than names although they often say which parish the two people were from, but some OPRs say where the marriage took place and indicate whether the entry is for the reading of banns or the actual marriage. When a marriage was conducted by a Church of Scotland minister, banns had to be proclaimed on three successive Sundays immediately before the marriage. Although OPR marriage entries can sometimes just be a record of the registration of banns, they may also state “and were married on …”.
Deaths are not well recorded at all – in fact it’s burials that are recorded, not deaths, and where such records survive they are usually just a list of names, sometimes with an age given. In some parishes, however, a spouse or parent name is included, and sometimes there’s a description of where in the graveyard the body was buried. When a burial took place, the family of the deceased would rent the parish mortcloth. This was a heavily embroidered cloth used to cover the coffin at a funeral. Details of mortcloth rents received can sometimes be found in the Kirk Session Minutes rather than the Parish Register, but often only list the date and amount received and not the name of the deceased.
How much detail you can get from the OPRs about your ancestors therefore depends on how the records were kept in the parish in which they lived.
Problems with lack of survival of entries in the OPRs
A major stumbling block to tracking ancestors before 1855 is that not all the baptisms and marriages that took place actually made it into the OPRs. Many if not most baptisms and marriages didn’t take place in the Kirk itself but were conducted by the Minister at people’s homes, although sometimes the OPR will say “before the congregation” if a baptism was done as part of a kirk service. As the Session Clerk wasn’t sitting there with the Parish Register open as the event took place, the Minister would keep a note to give to the Session Clerk or simply relied on his memory. This, unfortunately, means that some events never made into the Register at all, and no doubt it also means that sometimes the information that did go in wasn’t correct.
The ScotlandsPeople web site shows an image of an entry from 1704 that won’t be at all helpful to the ancestors of whoever was baptised: it says “George Something lawful son to What-ye-call-him in Mains”. So forgetfulness and laziness need to be taken into account as Ministers and Session Clerks were only human!
Even when an entry did make it into the Register, not all OPRs have survived for all the years they were kept. There are lots of reasons for their loss: they were never handed over, someone stole them, they were destroyed by damp, fire or mice, or someone at some stage thought they weren’t important and would be better used to light a fire. Who knows. ScotlandsPeople web site contains a list of which Parish Registers for which years have survived. When you look through the list it’s clear that entries for deaths/burials have not survived in many parishes, which makes it questionable as to whether they existed in the first place, but there can also be gaps for births and marriages in some parishes, which means a Register has gone astray.
It’s always good to know where there is a gap in parishes in which you’re searching, so you don’t make the mistake of assuming the event must have taken place elsewhere and end up thinking someone is your ancestor just because there’s an entry in a nearby parish for the right name and time frame. I have a family living in Tarves, Aberdeenshire in the first half of the 1800s and unfortunately the OPR for that parish has marriages from 1736 to 1801 and then from 1850 to 1861, but they’ve gone missing for 1802-1849, which is when some of my ancestors’ marriages took place.
Some OPRs may also have pages missing or have some pages in such a poor state they’re now illegible. There’s no way of knowing whether your ancestor may have been mentioned on the pages that haven’t survived.
Problems with the event not happening in the first place
There are two main problems here: parents who didn’t have their children baptised and couples who had an “irregular” marriage.
Not everyone had all their children baptised. There was often a fee to be paid to have an event recorded, but by no means everyone was willing, or could afford, to pay. There was also no law that forced people to register events, so as it wasn’t compulsory there were bound to people who didn’t bother, or perhaps meant to but didn’t get round to it. Also, the registers were kept by the Church of Scotland so anyone of a different faith (known as non-conformists) might not have given their information to Session Clerks. From what I’ve read and from looking for records for my own ancestors, it also seems that non-baptism was more likely in rapidly growing urban areas and in families who moved from parish to parish rather then spent their whole lives in the same place. My Ayrshire coal mining ancestors moved regularly, and all too often they failed to get one or more of their children into the OPR.
Not all marriages were recorded due to “irregular marriage” being reasonably common in Scotland – although it was dying out during the 1800s it remained legal until the 1940s. An irregular marriage happened when a man and a woman lived together as man and wife “by habit and repute”. They could declare themselves married in front of witnesses without the benefit of church involvement, and such marriages were legally binding. Occasionally you can come across a marriage entry in an OPR which says “having been irregularly married on …”. This means it’s possible that there are marriages in the OPR that took place some time after the irregular marriage and after the birth of one or more children. It also means it’s possible to find baptisms for a couple’s children without being able to find their marriage.
Problems with reading the writing and the spelling of names
Handwriting and lettering styles have changed a great deal over time, making the earlier OPRs quite difficult to read. Earlier Scottish handwriting had its own cursive style and isn’t easy for us to work out what was written when we’re only used to contemporary handwriting. Transcribing the OPRs in order to create a digital index – which has been done by FamilySearch and ScotlandsPeople – can’t have been an easy job, and no doubt errors have been made.
In addition, up until around the mid 1800s there wasn’t uniform spelling of names as there is today, and most of the people being recorded wouldn’t have been able to read and write and therefore didn’t know how to spell their name. Session Clerks wrote a lot of names using the best phonetic approximation they could come up. Strachan proved challenging for many Ayrshire Session Clerks, hence the very many variations found in the OPRs. Surnames also changed spelling as time went on: my Hutcheon ancestors eventually turned into Hutchison, and my Symon ancestors became Simon. I’ve also learnt to search for Fraser using a wildcard, where I can, searching for Fra*er so I pick up both Fraser and Frazer.
Not every Session Clerk had good handwriting, and faded ink, ink blots and damage due to age and damp also add to the difficulties faced when reading and transcribing OPRs. So you need to be flexible about how the name might have been originally written and then how that might have been transcribed when you’re doing a search of indexes to OPRs. At FamilySearch you can only see a transcript. At ScotlandsPeople you’re using transcripts to search the index, but once you find something you think is the right entry you can then download an image of the actual OPR page.
Illegitimate children are often referred to as unlawful child, begat by fornication, bastard child or simply have their mother named with no father recorded. However, Kirk Sessions were keen to identify the father of illegitimate children so they could make him financially responsible and prevent illegitimate children becoming a burden on the parish. Where a subsequent marriage did not take place, the father was often fined by the Kirk Session.
If you have an illegitimate ancestor, and can get to Edinburgh, it’s worth looking in the Kirk Session Minutes to see whether the parents had been interrogated by the Session. If they were, the record of their appearance often includes a wealth of detail. ScotlandsPeople is working on digitising the Kirk Session Minutes and they’ll be available online at some point in the future.
Civil Registration began in Scotland in 1855
The Registrar General’s Office was established in Scotland in 1855, and from then on statutory registration of births, marriages and deaths took place. However, not everyone complied immediately so it’s possible to fail to find a registration that ought to be there, especially for the period not long after 1855.
With civil registration came the requirement that births, marriages and deaths had to be recorded using preprinted forms that asked for much more information than can be found in the OPRs. Scottish certificates also contain more information than English ones – birth and death certificates contain the mother’s maiden name, marriage certificates contain both mother’s names, and death certificates name the parents when the informant knew who they were. Do bear in mind, though, that it says on a certificate what the Registrar was told, so sometimes they’re not exactly accurate. Registrars also occasionally made mistakes.
But once you get to 1855 researching Scottish ancestors becomes a lot easier. In addition, all Scottish post 1855 birth, marriage and death certificates have been digitised and their images made available online at the Scottish government’s pay to use web site ScotlandsPeople. One day England might catch up!