Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph

      The language of the Picts was a dialect of ancient British, akin to modern Welsh. Gaelic, another branch of the same tongue, developed in Ireland and was spoken by Irish settlers (the Scots) in Argyll and up the west coast, especially after the establishment of the Scots kingdom of Dalriada, about the second century AD. It gradually displaced ‘Pictish’ in the west and north. Its decline in the Lowlands was due mainly to the spread of Scots and English in the royal towns or burghs, and after the battle of Culloden in 1746 it began to vanish from the Highlands too. In the 1830s, the Second Statistical Account reports, for far-flung Assynt, Sutherland, that Gaelic was still spoken universally there, ‘…the only medium of religious instruction. The English language, however, is making slow but sure progress. The youth of the parish are ambitious of acquiring it, being sensible that the want of it proves a great bar to their advancement in life. It is likely, nonetheless, that Assynt is one of the very last districts in which the Gaelic language shall cease to be the language of the people.’

      Ironically, the Gaelic School Society helped bring Gaelic to an end: once children had learned to read the scripture in Gaelic, the Account says, they wanted to read more on other subjects, and to do this they needed to learn English.

      The Vikings’ tongue survives in many words and place names used in the areas they settled, and as a Scots/Norse hybrid, Norn, the native tongue of the Orkneys and Shetlands.

      The Scots language – for language it is – is a descendant, along with Northumbrian English, of the tongue of the Anglians of Lothian. It gradually dominated the Lowlands and then pushed northwards, though borrowing words freely from Gaelic, French, Dutch, and English. It was the official tongue of Scotland until 1707. In 1773, Dr Johnson observed that:

       ‘…the conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away: their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.’

      By writing in Scots, Burns helped save the language from obscurity and helped restore some of its old dignity too. Later writers and poets, such as William Robertson Melvin in the nineteenth century and Hugh MacDairmid in the twentieth century, have contributed to a limited revival. See Scots-English English-Scots Dictionary (Lomond Books, 1998, repr. 2001), The Concise Scots Dictionary (Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999) and an online dictionary, www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl.

       CHAPTER 4 Know your parish

       Your chances of success in tracing your Scottish family history, and of deriving enormous enjoyment from doing so, will be greatly enhanced by spending some time finding out about the places where your family lived.

      Trying to trace a family tree without studying where people lived makes no sense. Knowing whether the parish was a Highland or Lowland one makes a massive difference in understanding the sort of people who lived there. Were your people from an isolated Highland crofting district, a coastal settlement dependant on kelp and fish, a comfortable Lowland farming community or a prosperous royal burgh? You also need to know about the place to start working out what records it is likely to have generated, and where these will be found. If the area was subject to a franchise court, its records could be searched. Which commissary and sheriff’s courts had jurisdiction there? The more you know, the better.

       A farmer at Stroncruby tills his field using a horse-drawn plough, while his bull grazes the pasture and a goat makes do further up the mountain, from Hume’s 1774 Survey of Assynt, Map 11 (courtesy of Lord Strathnaver).

      Scotland’s parishes

      Church reform was pioneered by St Margaret, wife of Malcolm III Canmore (d. 1093). Up to then, priests lived under the same roofs as their lords or in monastic houses, some of which dated back to the time of St Columba (521-97), the Gaelic missionary credited with introducing Christianity to the Picts. By 1200, however, 11 dioceses had been created across the southern feudalized areas, each run by a bishop and divided into parishes containing new churches. The system was eventually extended across the whole country, with parishes dividing as the population grew. The rather chaotic situation, with no less than 64 parishes straddling county boundaries, was rationalized in 1891, meaning that some ancestors who never moved house appeared in one parish record before 1891, and in another one afterwards.

      When General Registration was introduced in 1855 each parish also became a Registration District, numbered from the furthest north (no. 1, Bressay) and working down to the furthest south (no. 901, Wigtown). Large city parishes were divided into several registration districts, and identified by the parish number followed by 1,2,3, etc. in superscript.

      Local histories

      The histories of many parishes have been written up. Ask at the local archives, look in the NLS catalogue or in The Bibliography of Scotland on

      Some historical background

       King Malcolm III Canmore and his wife, St Margaret (both died 1093).

       Kilchurn Castle, Loch Awe, Co. Argyll, seat of the Campbells of Glenorchy.

      The records you will be using have been greatly influenced by Scotland’s history, and in particular by King Malcolm III Canmore (d. 1093) and his immediate descendants, who consolidated royal power in Scotland.

      As T.C. Smout writes in his immensely useful A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 (Fontana Press, 1969, repr. 1985), modern Scotland comprises 80 per cent rough moor and bog, and things have improved vastly since Malcolm’s day. Then, its roughly 250,000 people inhabited tiny islands of semi-cultivated land, linked by boggy footpaths, surrounded by a howling wilderness of wolves, beavers, wild boar and aurochs. Their stone-walled homes, roofed with brushwood, turf or skins, were clustered into tiny farmtouns or bailies. Though ostensibly farmers, most people still depended heavily on Stone Age skills of hunting wild animals and gathering shellfish and fruits. Their overlords, the mormaers or earls, were of Pictish origin, and their groupings and allegiances mainly tribal.

      Malcolm and his wife St Margaret were influenced by the Normans’ adaptation of Roman ideas on how to run countries, and introduced similar systems of government in Scotland. Their son David I (d. 1153) spent 40 years at the English court, where he was Earl of Huntingdon. When he inherited the throne David came north with a great retinue of Anglo-Norman followers. ‘French in race and manner of life, in speech and culture’, the Scottish kings started to transform Scotland into a modern state, using feudalism, creation of royal burghs and sheriffdoms, and church reform as their chief tools.

      To feudalize a country, the king assumed full ownership of all land, and then granted parts of it to lords in return for their military support. David I started this process, leaving the old mormaers in place, but as new feudal lords. Through intermarriage, the old and new aristocracies merged into a semi-Norman, semi-native ruling class.

      The Canmore kings peppered the Lowlands with royal castles, and round each created royal burghs, which were settlements of craftsmen and merchants with trade monopolies over the hinterland. The burgers were drawn mainly from immigrant Normans, Angles, Scandinavians and Flemings, and used English as their lingua franca, contributing to the retreat of Gaelic into the Highlands. David I planted his