KEY 20TH CENTURY SCOTTISH RESOURCES
Chris Paton examines the 20th century records that can help with Scottish research, to help pacify us as we eagerly await the forthcoming 1921 Census release, and console us that there is still plenty for us to investigate in the meantime
While we might be itching to get our hands on the 1921 Census, Chris Paton reminds us that there is plenty to keep us busy until then
Nails are being bitten, teeth are slowly chattering, and nerves are growing ever more frayed, as Scots around the world patiently await the release of the 1921 Census. All good things come to those who wait, but if pinning all of your hopes on breaking through a brick wall with the 1921 census, have you truly already consulted all of the additional resources currently available which might also help? In this article I will take a look at some of the key 20th century resources available, and perhaps a few that you may not be quite so familiar with.
The essential starting point
The essential starting point for the 20th century are, of course, the registers for civil registration, first established in 1855. These records
of births, marriages and deaths for Scotland uniquely within the United Kingdom list the names of both parents, allowing us with relative ease to confirm that a candidate of interest is the same person within each type of record. In addition to the names of parents to a child, birth records also uniquely note the date and place of their marriage, a detail not provided in other British equivalents, which can help us to find their marriage record.
A marriage record in turn will note the ages of the two spouses, and their own parents’ names, allowing the location of their own birth records to be found with relative ease. Death records can usually be just as easily located to complete the story, with those for women indexed under both married and maiden names.
Indexes to all 20th-century records are available online through the Scotlandspeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) website, and many historic images, although closure periods are in place for access to the most recent images for privacy purposes – 100 years for births, 75 years for marriages, and 50 years for deaths. More recent records can be ordered as certified copies, but all records almost to the present day are available for consultation at various centres across Scotland offering access to the same database – the Scotlandspeople Centre in Edinburgh, and regional research hubs in Hawick, Kilmarnock, Glasgow, Alloa and Inverness. Contact details for these are available at (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/visit-us), although at the time of writing there are currently some access restrictions in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition, whilst there is a 50 year closure period online for death records, an alternative resource to help locate information on more recent deaths is the ‘Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2020’ collection on Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/60631/), which contains about 45% of all events registered in the two countries.
Some very specific changes…
Within the 20th century there were some very specific changes in how the civil records were recorded.
In 1919, for example, those who were born to unmarried parents were no longer marked as ‘illegitimate’ under their name in their birth record.
In 1930, the Adoption of Children (Scotland) Act in 1930 introduced a new adoptions register, which is inaccessible online, but which can be consulted in the Scotlandspeople Centre in Edinburgh. This does not provide the names of an adopted child’s birth parents, but the date of the formal adoption, and the names of the adoptive parents. Advice on how to pursue adoption records from this point can be sourced from the Adoption Unit of the National Records of Scotland (NRS) – further details are available at www. nrscotland.gov.uk/research/guides/adoption-records.
A huge change to marriage law also saw the introduction from 1940 of civil marriages in Scotland, with
the simultaneous abolition of most forms of ‘irregular marriage’, the most common of which was ‘marriage by declaration’. These are identifiable on a marriage record when the couple are stated to have been wed before two named witnesses ‘by declaration’ (an exchange of consent) and the event then subsequently registered with the aid of a warrant granted by a sheriff-substitute for the relevant county.
Another big change to the law on marriage occurred with the establishment of a statutory register of divorces from 1 May 1984, for cases heard before the sheriff courts. These are indexed online on Scotlandspeople, but will only confirm when a person’s divorce case was finalised and in which court; however, the indexes will also helpfully provide the date of the marriages being ended. It should be noted, however, that it is now more difficult in Scotland to see original divorce records unless you are one of the parties involved, with new privacy measures implemented to the records’ access for 100 years in 2015 (for further details see http://familytr.ee/nrsdiv).
Church records
Although Scotlandspeople’s Church of Scotland and other Presbyterian parish records are available up to 1855 only, there are some Roman Catholic records that extend into the 20th century on the site. A much larger collection of these can be found on Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk), with coverage for baptisms up to 1921, marriages up to 1946, and burials up to 1971.
Early 20th century census records
The 1921 census will be a wonderful resource when released, but prior to this there are two 20th century censuses already available online through the Scotlandspeople site, for 1901 and 1911. The 1911 census in particular can be very useful in identifying how many years a married woman has been so married, how many children she may have given birth to during her marriage, and how many of those were still alive. Scotlandspeople is the only site providing access to the 1911 records, but incomplete transcriptions from the 1901 census can also be viewed on
Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk), Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) Myheritage (www.myheritage.com), and (from June 2021) Thegenealogist. co.uk (www.thegenealogist.co.uk).
Wartime register
The National Identity Register for Scotland, compiled for wartime purposes as an impromptu census on 29 September 1939, can also be searched, via an application to the NRS. Extracts cost £15 per person, with the information returned including the name of an individual, a date of birth, an occupation and address only. Whilst limited, it can still help with research – for example, a family story that my great-grandmother was evacuated to Inverness from Glasgow prior to the Second World War turned out not to be quite true, with the 1939 register noting her to still be based in Glasgow in the first month of the war. In other cases, I have also found the dates of births of many Irish settlers in Scotland, for whom no birth or baptism record can be found in Ireland itself. Information on how to apply to the register for an extract can be found at www.nrscotland.gov.uk/ research/guides/national-register.
Exploring the Scottish-irish connection
If your ancestor was Irish and resident in Scotland, there are two useful 20th century resources that might assist further. From 1909, the UK introduced a state pension for those qualifying who were aged 70 or over. For those born in Ireland, an acceptable form of proof of age was an extract from the 1841 or 1851 census. Although these Irish censuses have not survived, the extracts have, and can be searched on the National Archives of Ireland’s genealogy records platform at http://censussearchforms.nationalarchives.ie/search/cs/home. jsp. Varying the search criteria for the ‘Applicant’s present address’ yields hundreds of Scottish-based applicants. For example, using the term ‘Scotland’ returns 387 applications, ‘Glasgow’ returns some 603 applications, ‘Edinburgh’ 626, ‘Dundee’ 47, ‘Ayr’ four, and Aberdeen just one.
If your ancestor was a Scottish-based Protestant originally from Ireland, he or she may have also signed the Ulster Covenant against Irish Home Rule. In such cases, the signatories usually listed their parish of origin in Ireland, rather than their requested Scottish home address, which can be particularly useful if the 1911 Scottish census simply states ‘born Ireland’. The Covenant signatures can be searched for free at www.nidirect.gov. uk/information-and-services/search-