Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph

      General Registration records

      Most developed countries have a system of compulsory civil registration (sometimes called General Registration) of births, marriages and deaths. Scottish General Registration started on 1 January 1855 (it began in 1837 in England and Wales, and in 1864 in Ireland, except for Protestant marriages that date from 1845).

      Scotland’s registration districts were based on existing parish boundaries, each with a local registrar, who was usually the local schoolmaster or doctor. All births had to be registered with him within twenty days, marriages within three days and deaths within eight days. The local registrars kept their own records, but sent copies to the GROS in Edinburgh, where full indexes were compiled from them all.

       An early twentieth-century photo of General Register House in Edinburgh.

      As registration districts equated to parishes, it’s easy to search for events taking place where you expect them to be. What may throw you are events being registered in unexpected locations. Some couples married away from their home parishes, children could be born at their mother’s mother’s home, and some people died in hospital, or on holiday, far from their normal home. When searching, you can nominate the registration district you want, but if the search does not work then choose ‘all districts’.

      This ‘solution’ can create a new problem – a massive list of possibilities. If you know the area well, you’ll be able to spot local parishes easily: if not, you may be faced with a list of places you’ve never heard of before. ScotlandsPeople helpfully includes the registration district’s county, and the GROS’s official list at www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/famrec/hlpsrch/list-of-parishes-registration-districts.html identifies the county or burgh in which the registration district lies, and its start date. It’s also easy to look them up on www.maps.google.co.uk/.

      Access to the records

      The records at the ScotlandsPeople Centre have all been digitized under the DIGROS (‘Digital Imaging of the Genealogical Records of Scotland’s people’) project. These images can be viewed (for a fee) on the ScotlandsPeople website or at the ScotlandsPeople Centre, where you can also see images of recent records (births for the last 100 years, marriages for the last 75 and deaths for the last 50) that cannot be viewed on the website.

      Alternatively you can visit or contact the local registrar who originally recorded the event – but often you won’t know which to ask, hence the point of using the national indexes.

      The digitized images are all you need for genealogy, but for official purposes (such as passports) you can order full certificates from www.gro-scotland.gov.uk.

      The miraculous year of 1855

      So enthusiastic were the people who introduced General Registration in 1855 that they included many details on their records that had never been recorded before. Sadly, the effort of including so much proved too complicated, so the forms were greatly simplified for 1856, though some extra information was then restored in 1861. These changes are identified below. Bear in mind that any event recorded in 1855 will be more detailed than anything before or after it. If an ancestor died or was married in 1855, you will gain useful extra information. Your ancestor may not have been born in 1855, but censuses may indicate a sibling of theirs who was: if so, it is worth getting their birth record, because it will tell you a lot about your ancestor’s family.

      Using the records

      By quizzing your family, you will usually be able to draw a family tree starting with a name, ‘Alexander or maybe Angus MacLeod’, followed by their child, with a bit more information say, ‘Malcolm MacLeod, born in 1922’, and then a third generation down, with much more definite information: ‘Flora MacLeod, born on 22 April 1951, Gorbals, Glasgow’. You may think you’ll save money and time if you start with Alexander (or Angus!), but what can you really look for? Starting with Malcolm would be better, as you can look for a birth in 1922, but as you don’t know where Malcolm was born, you’ve no idea where to look. You’re probably not 100 per cent sure that the year 1922 was correct anyway: it may have been calculated from an age at death, and these seldom take into account when in the year people’s birthdays fell, so Malcolm could have been born in 1921 or 1923. Therefore, start with what you know for sure, and seek Flora’s birth certificate. Once you have this, you’ve established a firm foothold, and can work back with confidence.

      The birth record is a contemporary source, providing the parents’ names, probably from their own mouths – not half-remembered hearsay, then, but fact. Now, turn to the marriage indexes, seeking their wedding. Marriage records usually state ages of the couple and the full names of all four parents. Thus, following our example, once you’ve worked back from Flora’s birth to her father Malcolm’s marriage, you’ll have a definite age for Malcolm, and know his parents’ full names, including whether the father was really called Alexander or Angus. Sometimes, admittedly, people got details wrong, or lied: if you discover discrepancies, you’ll simply have to widen the period of your next search.

      The next step is to seek Malcolm’s birth: if his parents’ names match those given on his marriage record, you’ll know you have the right document.

      A special feature of Scottish General Registration records, that is not found in the rest of the British Isles, is that death records state the parents’ names. Admittedly, these can be inaccurate, because the informant of the death may have been born years after the deceased’s parents died. But, usually, this extra feature is very helpful, and deaths should always be sought as a normal part of tracing your

       Eleanor Conquer, born 1876 in Haddington (courtesy of the Crowley Family Collection).

      Scottish family history. To help you search, all birth, marriage and death records state whether the person’s parents were alive or dead at the time, and in the nineteenth century you can hone the search further using census returns.

      Births

      Births of boys and girls were indexed separately, though this is of no consequence when searching online. The indexes show:

       child’s name.

       registration district.

       reference number. Twins are not identified explicitly in the records, but can sometimes be spotted by reference numbers that indicate their appearance on the same or adjacent pages as another child in the same district with the same surname.

       from 1929 mothers’ maiden names appear, making it much easier to search for all children of a particular couple, or indeed for an illegitimate child (where the child’s surname and mother’s maiden surname will be the same).

       Birth certificate for Alexandrina MacLeod, from family papers. She was born at ‘9 hours pm’ on 4 January 1905 (the year is very badly written but can be confirmed from the clearer date of registration, 16 January 1905) at Badnaban, Assynt. The record includes her parents’ date and place of marriage (courtesy of Mrs Moira Crowley).

      Birth records always show:

       child’s names. If the baby’s name was changed, a diamond-shaped stamp will appear on the birth entry, with a reference to the Register of Corrected Entries (at the ScotlandsPeople Centre and website). Rarely, a birth will be registered before the child’s name has been chosen: these entries should be found at the