Thursday 8 April 2010

New parishes online from our Valuation Roll


As promised I have updated our website with some more parishes from our Dumfriesshire Valuation Roll. We now have Annan, Applegarth, Caerlaverock, Canonbie, Closeburn, Cummertrees, Dalton, Dornock, Dryfesdale, Dumfries, Dunscore and Durisdeer all online. One thing to note though: both Dumfries and Annan are the landward parts of the parish only, the burgh sections were in a separate volume.

The last time we were in the National Archives I was discussing just how valuable these valuation rolls are. I love them, and the National Archives have been doing a lot of work digitizing the volumes to make them even easier and faster to search. Most of the local archives or libraries in Scotland also tend to have the volumes for their area so if you are in Scotland but not near Edinburgh they are still accessible. I know I have used the volumes at the Ewart library in Dumfries a number of times both to research the history of a house and genealogy.

If you are not familiar with this great resource have a look at the National Archives website or look at the volume we have online to see for yourselves what a great resource they are. They can really help to fill in the blanks between the census and also there is no 100 year closure are very helpful from 1901/1911 right up to 1989!

I mentioned digitizing these volumes, although volumes exist for every year from 1855 onwards, they have so far been indexed only every tenth year, but at intervals half-way between each census year, from 1855-56 up to 1915-16. These digital images are only available in the National Archives at present, which is quite a shame for those of you not living in Scotland.

We can search them for you and offer very reasonable prices for all our research in Edinburgh or other local libraries. We have details on our website or just email me with the details of what you are looking for and I will give you a price.

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