Visit Scotland and take a walk in your ancestors' footsteps

To most people tracing their family history means more than just finding out dates and names and putting them on a chart. It means understanding your ancestors’ lives, having the ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ experience.

Jedburgh Castle Jail

2014 is a great year to visit Scotland and discover the place ancestors called home. You may find that the area they lived is not what you had in mind. When you think of Scotland do you think of clans and tartan? Well there is much more to Scotland than that. In fact if your ancestors were from the south of Scotland they probably never wore a kilt in their life! That doesn’t mean however that the south has any less of a rich heritage, rather your history is just different.

So what was life really like, how can you find out?

A good place to start is finding out where they actually lived. Can you pinpoint the house? Agricultural labourers moved around a lot, so you may not be able to find every house. Of course, some may no longer be standing. By using the National Library of Scotland’s excellent collection of online maps, though, you can often find the house they lived in. We have linked a lot of the census entries we have transcribed to maps, so use our census collection to help you. If you can’t work it out e-mail us and we can help.

What else?

You may be able to find their final resting place. The Borders Family History Society has an online Gravestone index (surnames only) from which you can purchase a book with more information. These help you find the grave so that you can visit it when you come over.

Local museums

There are lots of small local museums, often run by volunteers who can tell you the ‘true’ history of the place. Most towns have their own museum, run by the local council and admission is free. Here are some excellent ones we have visited:

The Stewartry Museum

Hawick Museum

Annan Museum

Jedburgh Jail

Jedburgh Castle Jail

Walk through the old cells

If you have found your ancestor in our prison database you may be able to visit the jail they were locked up in! Jedburgh Castle Jail gives you a real taste of life behind bars. You can even walk round and round the exercise yard!

Historical customs - Loupin' Stanes

Named the Loupin' Stanes because of the somewhat dangerous custom of young men leaping from one to another to prove their love to their girl and gain her hand in marriage! A custom long since stopped as too many legs were broken! This site is on the Eskdale Prehistoric Trail.

Old Towers

Today people visit Scotland for its peace and tranquility, but it was not always thus! Peppered across the south of Scotland are the remains of towers, places where you could run to for protection.

Perhaps you ancestor was out ploughing their land, their family inside a wee thatched house, long since gone. Over the hill in the distance they see the glint of sun reflecting against armour. There is no way they could be safe in their home, they would run to a tower for protection.

You can still visit these today, sit at the window and imagine how it would have felt to be cooped up with animals, open drains, no running water and the rain driving against the wall!

Some of these are preserved now by Historic Scotland, others are on private land. Most landowners, though, are more than happy to give access, ask somebody who lives nearby and they can often point you to who owns the land so that you can arrange to get a key (if necessary) or show you around.

These are just some of the lesser known sites I know of, every local area has their own hidden treasures. Come home in 2014, get off the tourist route and visit the land of your ancestors.

The 1831 census of Jedburgh is now transcribed

As we all know the 1841 census is the first Scottish census which has survived throughout almost all of Scotland, however there are some pre 1841 censuses that do survive and some are very detailed. We have just published the 1831 census of Jedburgh in Roxburghshire. You can buy it directly from Maxwell Ancestry for just £8.99. Follow this link for a free list of  the surnames contained in the book: http://www.maxwellancestry.com/ancestry/publishing/names/31792.htm

Only basic statistical information was required to be submitted for each parish in the censuses prior to 1841. Very few listings containing the names of individuals, therefore, have survived.  In the case of Jedburgh parish, what has survived is simply a listing of heads of households, followed by statistics about their household. As the manner in which the data was collected in these early census years was left up to each individual schoolmaster to decide for himself, there is no standard way the information is laid out. We have followed closely the format the original material is laid out in.

The population of Jedburgh parish in 1831 was 5.647, with 1,227 households listed. The record is split into two sections, one for the burgh (population 3,617) and one for the landward part of the parish (population 2,030). The burgh section includes the houses within both the ancient Royal Burgh and the Parliamentary Burgh boundaries. The Burgh section includes frequent additional information in the ‘Remarks to enable to answer additional Queries’ column, but unfortunately this has not been filled in for the landward section of the parish. In the ‘Remarks’ column, frequent reference is made to ‘above’ and ‘below’. This refers to other individuals in the household other than the household head, above or below the age of 20 years, engaged in occupations to be recorded for the census statistics. If another occupation is listed in the remarks column, and the ‘Males above 20’ column is higher than one, the additional occupation(s) are likely to be for the other adult males in the household.

1851 census for Kells now online

We have been making great progress with www.maxwellancestry.com. Various new records are now online and more will be coming shortly as well as new books, some of which will be ready in the next day or two.

The big census update is 1851 Kells, Kirkcudbrightshire; this is now in the database and also available from our bookshop. We have also added more household links, general notes and prison links to the database.

Regarding the prison indexing project, Graham has now indexed the second Jedburgh volume and is proof-reading it now so it should be on sale within a couple of weeks. He has now also started work on the next Scottish Borders prison, which is Kelso. Although various links will appear in the census database from now this is not by any means a search of the prison registers themselves. In fact less than 1% of the prison entries have any link with the census records at present. Therefore if your ancestors are from the Borders area it is best to check in the actual prison index. If you do not already have a copy they are available from our bookshop.

The mapping is also continuing, Hawick and Wilton parishes are next, these may take some time though! Big towns always seem to slow up the census mapping project!

I’ll let you know when the new Jedburgh prison book is ready.