Double trouble

Published on Saturday 29 July 2006 00:58

IS IT POSSIBLE to find out anything about people who entered into bigamous marriages? J McIver (by e-mail)

• If one of your ancestors entered into a bigamous marriage it is likely that there would have been a prosecution.

You will often first notice that there is something amiss with a marriage from the entry in the statutory marriage records held by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS). After the bigamous marriage was proved, a correction would need to be made to the record of the second marriage. This will manifest itself as a reference in the margin to the Register of Corrected Entries (Reg. Cor. Ent. or RCE), also held by the GROS. This entry itself will give you quite a bit of information to continue your search.

A bigamy prosecution would either be heard at the High Court of Justiciary, the supreme criminal court, or at one of the local sheriff courts, depending on the severity of the case. If the circumstances were thought to be especially reprehensible the case would have been dealt with in the High Court but in practice they were almost always held at sheriff courts. They would have taken place in the sheriff's summary court, which means they would have been heard by a sheriff sitting alone without a jury.

Papers relating to summary criminal trials are destroyed by the sheriff courts after a period of ten years. It is therefore unlikely that case papers relating to the trial will exist. The surviving record of these trials would be preserved in the criminal or quasi-criminal roll books of individual courts, albeit in a very brief form. The records of cases heard at sheriff courts are un-indexed, but if you know the year the trial took place and in which sheriff court, they are not too cumbersome to search through. Sheriff court papers which are preserved are held by the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.

The NAS also has a database of serious 19th-century criminal trials which took place in the High Court of Justiciary, either in Edinburgh or on circuit around Scotland.

This contains around 480 cases of men and women charged with bigamy whose trial took place at the High Court. The sentences handed down by the High Court for bigamy range from three months in prison to, in a couple of cases, a sentence of transportation for seven years.

• You can get a fair amount of information about the accused from this database, which can only be consulted in the National Archives of Scotland's West Search Room in West Register House. More information on criminal records held by the NAS can be found at: www.nas.gov.uk

• If you have a question for the Genealogy Clinic e-mail the team at [e-mail] We will endeavour to deal with all enquiries as quickly as possible, but we regret that we cannot enter into personal correspondence.

• ScotlandsPeople is a partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon.