RECORD ROUND-UP
What’s available online and in the archives
Archive access
As well as the online credits-based platform ScotlandsPeople ( scotlandspeople.gov.
uk), unlimited access to parish records can be gained through a different version of the ScotlandsPeople database for a daily fee of £15 at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh ( scotlandspeople.gov.uk/visit-us), or at Local Family History Centres in Alloa, Glasgow, Hawick, Inverness and Kilmarnock. For details visit nrscotland.gov.uk/research/localfamily-history-centres.
FamilySearch
Indexes for surviving pre-1855 Church of Scotland baptismal and marriage registers are freely hosted on FamilySearch ( familysearch.
org). You can find them within the International Genealogical Index database and two additional collections: Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564– 1950 and Scotland Marriages, 1561–1910. However, burial and death records are not currently indexed within this site.
Military records
Not all of the Catholic records available through ScotlandsPeople are actually Scottish – the Bishopric of the Forces collection (as held in Aldershot) is also included, and contains records of Roman Catholic British armed forces personnel from bases around the world.
Nonconformist
The ScotlandsPeople database also hosts registers from additional denominations. The ‘Other Churches’ category has nonconformist Presbyterian parish records, from parishes that broke away from the Kirk following major splits over the issue of patronage, or that had the right to call a minister to the pulpit.
Family historians can find additional indexed records from nonconformist denominations in Ancestry’s Scotland, Extracted Parish Records, 1571–1997 database ( bit.ly/scotland
extracted) and via the FreeBMD companion website FreeREG at freereg.org.uk.
Old Parish Registers
Images of Old Parish Registers can be viewed on microfilm at various libraries and archives across Scotland, or via ScotlandsPeople. The records are presented in three searchable databases: births and baptisms, banns and marriages, and deaths and burials.
Most are sourced from the parish registers, although some records for marriages and burials may instead have been found within the registers or accounts of the kirk sessions. These may document costs for the banns to be proclaimed before a marriage, or for the hire of a ‘mortcloth’ to drape over a coffin – these are sometimes the only surviving records for the events referred to.
Roman Catholic
ScotlandsPeople’s ‘Roman Catholic Church’ database contains not only the vital records registers for Catholic parishes, as sourced from the Scottish Catholic Archives ( scottishcatholicarchives.org.uk), but also additional material such as registers of communicants, sick calls, status animarum records (meaning ‘state of the soul’, for a form of church census recording all of the Catholics within a particular area), lists of converts, first confessions and seat rents. The earliest register is from 1703, but the majority of records are from the early 19th century onwards, and there is a dramatic growth in coverage following the Irish Famine of the 1840s, which saw many Irish Catholic immigrants arrive in Scotland.