MAPS AND LOCATIONS

STATISTICAL ACCOUNTS stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/ dist/ index.html

The statistical accounts of Scotland were recorded for each county in the 1790s and 1830s/40s by Church of Scotland parish ministers. They provide detailed gazetteer-style entries, offering a muchneeded contemporary canvas on which to paint your ancestors’ stories. They are freely available and searchable on the website and on Google Books.

PLACE NAMES scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/ digital-volumes/ ordnance-survey-name-books

ScotlandsPlaces’ Ordnance Survey Name Books collection offers information recorded in the mid-19th century from the original creation of the OS mapping project. These not only provide information on the derivation of a place name and some local history, they also name locals acting as informants, who may well be relatives.

TOPOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY british-history.ac.uk

The British History Online website has a range of free resources of use for Scottish research, including Samuel Lewis’s A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland, first published in 1846. Essentially a gazetteer, it carries detailed descriptions of every settlement in the country in the mid-19th century, in alphabetical order.

NLS MAPS maps.nls.uk

The National Library of Scotland’s free to access maps collection is by far the most definitive and accessible mapping collection in the UK. It has thousands of maps for Scotland from 1560-1964, but also holdings for England, Britain, Ireland, and more.

POST OFFICE DIRECTORIES digital.nls.uk/ directories

The National Library of Scotland offers free access to over 700 Post Office directories from 1773-1911. All are searchable and can be downloaded in PDF format. Note that further volumes up to the 1940s can be found on the Internet Archive ( archive.

org), which helped to digitise them.