Anthony Adolph - Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

Knowing what a document is likely to say can help enormously. Examples of old documents, highlighting where to find the genealogically relevant parts, are in P. Gouldesborough’s Formulary of Old Scots Legal Documents (Edinburgh, 1985).

If you’re stuck over a word you cannot read, look for others in the document that you can. By doing so you can work out how the writer formed each letter, and you can use this technique to decipher otherwise illegible words.

Before you start research amongst records, it’s sensible to have a good idea of where to find the records you will need, online or on the ground. Here is an overview.

Many of Scotland’s records are found in Edinburgh. The main port of call there is the new ScotlandsPeople Centre, opened in 2008, and housed in two adjoining, venerable institutions at the end of Princes Street, New Register House (home of the General Register Office or GROS), and General Register House. The Centre has several searchrooms, including disabled access, and offers a free two-hour ‘taster session’ each day for newcomers.

Visitors are allocated a computer terminal for a fixed daily fee (currently £10), or you can pay an hourly rate for expert help. Via the terminals you can search broadly the same material that is available on www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk– General Registration records, censuses, Old Parochial Registers (OPRs), testaments and wills to 1901, and the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings (not yet on the website). The terminals can save up to 200 images, that can be downloaded to a memory stick for a fee, or returned to on a later visit. Check the website for the Centre’s opening times and details of how to book.

The old Sasine Office of the National Archives of Scotland, now the entrance to the Historical Search Room.

The original heraldic records are in the Court of the Lord Lyon, on the first floor of New Register House www.lyon-court.com.

General Register House is one of the two buildings of the National Archives of Scotland (NAS, formerly the Scottish Record Office or SRO), containing many national and local records. Here are located the Legal Search Room and the Historical Search Room; the latter being the one most frequented by genealogists. The NAS’s other building, West Register House, home to its maps and court records, is a mile (1.6 kilometers) away in Charlotte Square. The NAS’s official guide is Tracing your Scottish Ancestors (NAS, fourth edn, 2007) which, despite its title, is mainly concerned with its own holdings. The NAS website includes its catalogue (called OPAC, the Online Public Access Catalogue) and guides to the records at www.nas.gov.uk/guides/.You can simply key a place name or family name into the catalogue and see what appears – usually a great deal. To hone searches, choose specific time periods or categories of record. To find the kirk session records for a specific parish, for example, you would key in the parish name followed by the reference CH2.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS, www.nls.uk) contains many useful journals and books, as does Edinburgh City Library, which also has a good collection of Scottish newspapers. The NLS Map Library is in Salisbury Place, and its collection is now accessible online at www.nls.uk/maps/index.html.

Scotland is well supplied with local archives, business and institutional archives. There is an increasing number of small visitor centres catering to local interest in history and genealogy, and to genealogical tourists, such as the Comainn Eachdraidh or Western Isles Historical Societies. For addresses, see the slightly out-of-date Exploring Scottish History (M. Cox, ed, Scottish Library Association, 1999), or look at the tourist information website www.visitscotland.com/under ‘visitor attractions’.

At present 52 archives are linked in the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN), whose catalogues can be accessed at www.scan.org.uk.It’s worth looking at the site’s ‘knowledge base’ that has information on all manner of things from old legal terms and old money to a gazetteer of ‘problem places’ (SCAN includes www.scottishdocuments.com, whose records, slightly confusingly, are accessible via ScotlandsPeople).

Other websites useful for locating archives and records are:

GROS and the ScotlandsPeople Centre

New Register House,

3 West Register Street,

Edinburgh,

EH13YT

www.gro-scotland.gov.uk

The National Archives of Scotland (NAS)

HM General Register House

2 Princes Street

Edinburgh

EH13YY

www.nas.gov.uk

National Library of Scotland

George IV Bridge

Edinburgh

EH11EW

www.nls.uk

Scottish Life Archive

National Museum of Scotland

Chambers Street

Edinburgh

EH11JF

www.nms.ac.uk

See also pages 215-17 for more useful addresses.

The websites of the National Archives of Scotland and the General Register Office of Scotland.

www.archon.nationalarchives.gov.uk – covering local archives, museums, universities and similar institutions.

www.familia.org.uk – public library holdings of genealogical material.

www.archiveshob.ac.uk – focuses on holdings of academic institutions.

Before visiting any archive, always check its website or telephone for opening times, what identification you may need, fees charged, and whether you need to book. Also, make sure that the records you are planning to search are likely to tell you what you are hoping to find out – this guide should help you do that.

The NRAS ( www.nas.gov.uk/nras) catalogues privately- or publicly-held papers of many individuals, families, landed estates, clubs, societies, businesses and law firms. Its online catalogue is particularly useful for finding estate papers of families who may have been your ancestors’ landlords, or archives of businesses that may have been your family’s employers.

The Scottish Genealogy Society ( www.scotsgenealogy.com) was founded in Edinburgh in 1953 to promote research into Scottish family history and to encourage the collection, exchange and publication of material relating to Scottish genealogy and family history. It has an excellent library, keeps a register of people researching specific surnames, and publishes a quarterly magazine, The Scottish Genealogist.

The old kirk at Inchnadamph, Sutherland, now beautifully restored by Historic Assynt (www.historicassynt. co.uk) as a focal point for studying the genealogy and history of Assynt.

The Society of Genealogists (SoG) in London has a vast collection of printed and manuscript sources covering all the British Isles, including a great deal for Scotland. A summary of its Scottish holdings is at www.sog.org.uk/prc/sct.shtml.Its largest manuscript collection is The MacLeod Collection, comprising the working papers of Revd Walter MacLeod and his son John, both professional genealogists in Edinburgh from about 1880 to 1940. Its 83 boxes are in rough surname order, though seem to contain mainly notes, not finished reports.