Start of a long search

Published on Saturday 15 July 2006 02:11

AN ANCESTOR of mine was born in Scotland around 1780. I learned this by looking at the 1851 England census, which gave his age then as 71. I have no information as to which town or part of Scotland he came from. Is there a shortcut to searching the records? M Wright (by e-mail)

If you have been lucky enough to get beyond the year 1855, when the statutory registers begin, then the old parish registers (OPRs) may take you back further. Many of these are available in the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS).

The OPRs are the registers of the established Church, the Church of Scotland, so members of other churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church, may not be recorded. They record births and baptisms; proclamations of banns or marriages; and deaths or burials, up to 1854. The parish ministers or session clerks of some 900 parishes kept these registers until their formal transfer to the GROS. The 3,500 or so surviving registers are far from complete. A lot of parishes do not have any burial or death registers. Most entries contain relatively little information by comparison to the statutory registers.

The ScotlandsPeople website contains an index for the OPRs held by the GROS, which will provide you with your shortcut into the records. The index is searched by surname, although you can also include forename, sex, parents' names and choose a date range to narrow your search. The parish registers may record the date of birth or the date of baptism or both, but only one or the other will appear in the index. There is no indication in the index as to whether the entry is a birth or baptism, but it is more usual for the index entry to show the baptism date.

Most entries contain very little detail. At best, you may find the following: name of the child, whether legitimate or not, date of birth and/or date of baptism, father's name, mother's name and maiden surname, place or parish of residence, occupation of the father and names (and sometimes occupations) of witnesses. You may find the mother's name is not recorded at all between certain years (as in Alyth parish between 1742 and 1786), or that the entry does not record the sex and the name is ambiguous.

You can use the information that you do find to further your ancestry search. The parents' names (if both are recorded) will help pinpoint a marriage. Record information on witnesses and any family connection, since these can be invaluable in determining the correct line. Bear in mind also that it was quite common for families, in an era of high infant mortality, to name a subsequent child after a dead sibling.

• 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.