Tuesday 13 May 2014

Love in the Archives

Regular readers of my blog may remember that I wrote about the ‘Notices of Admissions by the Superintendent of the Mental Institutions’ a while ago. They are very interesting documents held by the National Records of Scotland under the reference MC2.


These records can help with genealogy and add to your personal family story. More than that though, they are of national importance as they document a period when doctors and others were trying to get to grips with mental health problems. Each record includes the reports of two doctors, both on what they have observed and on what has been reported.


Yesterday I came across a record that described a poor young chap this way:


‘Falling in Love with many Ladies at the same time...’


It seems from these records that the poor lad also thought he was going to be poisoned and seems to have turned to drink. I’ll try and find out what happened to him, I hope it all turned out well!


It just shows the value of searching records beyond the obvious Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records. To properly research your family tree you need to get to know what is available both in the National Records of Scotland and local archives.


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