Breaking Down those Brickwalls: Scottish Death Certificates

New Register House, Edinburgh

As is the case with birth and marriage certificates, 1855 is a great year from a genealogist's point of view.

In this first year of registration Scottish death certificates included the following information:

Date, time and place of death, usual residence, deceased's name, sex, marital status, age and occupation, the deceased's place of birth, spouse's name, both parents' names (including the mother’s maiden surname) and whether deceased, occupations and whether they were deceased, the names and ages of children (or age and year of death if the child pre-deceased the parent), cause of death, duration of last illness, doctor's name, when the doctor last saw the deceased alive, place of burial, the name of the undertaker and details of the informant.

Much of the bounty of information recorded in 1855 was sadly not continued after that year. From 1856-1860 you can expect to find the name, marital status, occupation, date, time and place of death and usual residence, full names of both parents and whether deceased, cause of death, duration of disease and doctor's name, place of burial and undertaker's name, and details of the informant.

Did you know?

By looking at your ancestor's death certificate between 1855 and 1860, or even that of a close relative such as a sibling, you may get a clue as to where the rest of the family were buried. If it was a family plot you may then be able to trace your ancestors using transcriptions of the gravestone, if it has survived. It’s not unusual to find three generations recorded on one gravestone!


Find out more about Scottish civil registration on our website: http://www.scottishindexes.com/learningcivil.aspx

40,000 Scottish Mental Health Records

We have been working along with a very hard working team of volunteers and we have now reached a milestone in our project to index Scottish mental health records. We have indexed the first 40,000 entries.

If you have not used these records before you will be amazed by them. Sometimes the stories are sad, sometimes reassuring, but there are so many stories to tell. For example here is an excerpt from the entry of Jean McTavish or McAlpine. Jean was aged 60 and a widow, it seems that the ‘supposed cause’ of her health problem was intemperance. Below is an account of what a doctor observed. It seems she imagined herself to be only 26 years of age, and that she was a bird.

Reading these records makes the people come to life in our minds, I can almost picture poor Jean in front of the official, looking rather older than her 60 years perhaps, but all the while believing she was only 26. Granted, this record does not answer all our questions, but it makes Jean real. It tells us more than the basic records and it preserves the memory of poor Jean for her descendants.

Search at www.scottishindexes.com

Dog Tax

For many households, dogs are very much part of the family, but they do not generally appear in official records. For a brief spell in the 18th century, however, a tax was levied on dog owners (this tax was on non-working dogs). The tax records for Scotland are available on the ScotlandsPlaces website (which is a free website), so you can easily search them to find out if your family had a (non-working) dog.

The Dog Tax rolls 1797-1798 are in two volumes, arranged by county with each parish being listed within that county. Let us know if you find a entry relating to your family.

7 July 1905 - Peebles Hydropathic Burned to the Ground

Peebles Hydropathic before the fire

To us researching your family tree is more than just gathering names, dates and places. Tracing your genealogy should be a journey of discovery, getting to know the people along the way, in effect having your own ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ experience!

Edinburgh Evening News
08 July 1905
Copyright British Newspaper Archive

Newspapers and old photographs are a great way to add to the knowledge you have gleaned from certificates and census returns. Sometimes newspapers name our ancestors but at other times we will need to think a little more laterally, searching for stories about the places they lived and worked.

On this day 110 years ago the Peebles Hydropathic hotel was burned to the ground. As you can see from the photographs that accompany this blog the destruction was devastating and complete. For those visiting the Hydropathic, those staying there and those living in the town it must have been one of the most, if not the most, traumatic events in their lives.

Peebles Hydropathic after the fire

The newspaper accounts don’t mention many people but you may have found from the census that your ancestors worked at the Hydropathic, if they did they were likely involved in the incident. The lesson is to think laterally when searching the newspapers and you may discover an incident that would have impacted on your family greatly even though they are not mentioned as individuals.

The British Newspaper Archive is a wonderful resource if you are searching for UK ancestors. They are steadily increasing their holdings and you can also request certain newspapers. The BNA collection is also part of some Findmypast subscriptions. If you live in Scotland you can access many Scottish newspapers through the National Library of Scotland’s ‘Licensed digital collections’ (free): all you have to do is register. The NLS also has a large collection of newspapers on microfilm that are free to view in person.

Many local libraries and archives hold newspapers for the local area and libraries such as the Ewart in Dumfries allow digital photography. There are also many newspapers on Google which are free to use.

The New Peebles Hydropathic

Finding Birth, Marriage and Death Records Before 1855

From 1855 onwards, finding records of births, marriages and deaths could not be much easier than it is in Scotland. All historical records are available to view on the Scotland’s People website (at a fee).

For the period prior to 1855, the Scotland’s People website also has the Church of Scotland Old Parochial Registers (OPRs) that have survived. The question is this: if you can’t find a birth, marriage or death in the OPRs, does that mean that no record exists?

The answer is a resounding NO! There are many registers lying unindexed which could hold the key to progressing your family tree.

Our new Learning Zone section ‘Finding Birth, Marriage and Death Records Before 1855’ has been designed to explain the situation and help you find the records you need.

Please let me know if you have a question which is not covered in the Learning Zone.

In search of the Old Age Pension records - Part Two

Following on from my post “In search of the Old Age Pension records - Part One” I am going to write today about some of the surviving Old Age Pension (OAP) records I have found.

In various local Scottish Archives, such as the Dumfries and Galloway Archives at the Ewart Library in Dumfries, there are Old Age Pension Committee Registers. The example (which I have viewed) held in Dumfries is that of Moffat Town Council (reference CB842/1/2/9). It is entitled “Town Council Old Age Pension Committee : Register” and runs from 1908-1948. 

The headings in this register are as follows:

Consecutive number 
Full Name of Claimant, or of Pensioner in regard to whom a question is raised 
Address of Claimant, or Pensioner 
Date on which claim received when made direct to Committee 
Date on which claim referred to Pension Officer 
Date on which claim or question and report received from Pension Officer 
District and Station of Pension Officer 
Number in Pension Officer’s Register 
Date or dates on which claim or question considered by Committee 
Date (of any) on which Claimant or Pensioner (or person appearing on his behalf) heard by Committee 
Decision of Committee and Date (If claim disallowed, give reason) 
Date of notification of decision to (a) Claimant or Pensioner 
Date of notification of decision to (b) Pension Officer 
Date of receipt of notification of appeal 
Name and Address of Appellant (If the Claimant, pr Pension, or the Pension Officer s the Appellant, insert “Claimant,” “Pensioner,” or “Pension Officer,” without address 
Date on which documents relating to claim or question sent to Local Government Board [in correspondence this is often referred to as the LGB] 
Date of notification to Claimant or Pensioner of appeal having been made 
Decision of Local Government Board and date of receipt 
Date of notification of decision of Local Government Board to (a) Claimant, or Pension or other Appellant 
Date of notification of decision of Local Government Board to (b) Pension Officer 
Amount of Pension and date on which Pension becomes payable 
Date on which documents relating to claim or question sent to Pension Officer 
Remarks, e.g. : Note of disqualification or death of Pensioner, or reference to any later entry relating to the same person. 

There are two things I would like to note here. Firstly, relatively few of these registers survive: the only examples held in Dumfries and Galloway Archives seems to those for Moffat and Langholm. Up and down Scotland and in even at The National Archives in Kew there appear to be a few similar examples, but covering only a small fraction of Scotland.

The second thing is that they do not tell us a lot from a genealogical standpoint. There are no dates of birth, for example. They do give addresses, which could occasionally be useful, but it is likely that this information could more readily be gleaned from other sources, such as valuation rolls.

In summary, if you are reading this blog whilst studying the history of the welfare state in the UK these volumes might well be of interest to you. If you are researching your family tree, however, you may find their usefulness is minimal.


UPDATE: Read part three

More collections go online - Scottish Marriages and Deaths

We have added two more collections to our online indexes: marriages/banns and deaths/burials.

As with our online birth/baptism search which we announced earlier this week you can now search all the entries in our pre-existing indexes in book form plus some new ones not available before. All of these are indexes of pre-1855 records that for some reason do not appear in the Church of Scotland Old Parish Records, or OPRs. This means when you search scotlandspeople.go.uk these records do not show up.

How does it work?

Deaths/Burials:

You can search by Forename, Surname, Year of Death, County of Death, Parish of Death, or a combination of the above. As with searching the census, less is often more. Perhaps the person didn’t die when you expect or not in the location you expect. Married or widowed females are often recorded only under their maiden surname and first names and surnames appear under an amazing variety of spellings.

Here’s how the search page looks:

Marriages:

When you search for a marriage you can search by either the Groom’s Name, the Bride’s Name or both. The results show:

 “Groom’s Name”, “Bride’s Name”, “Year” and “Register”.

Remember that the register and place of residence are not necessarily the same thing. With this in mind, we have also indexed by parish of marriage (or most likely parish of marriage), which at times may be different from the parish name on the register. If people attended a non-Church of Scotland Church they may have travelled across parish boundaries to be married by the minister of their choice. Also if the couple were from different parishes the banns would have been read out in both. Not all registers specify where the marriage took place, in these cases we have indexed the parish as the parish the register was kept in.

The full entries of the birth, marriage or death costs just £1.50 and you can pay through PayPal.

Remember you can also search our other indexes online, here’s a list of all our indexes:

Parish Register Births

Parish Register Marriages

Parish Register Deaths

Prison Registers

Sheriff Court Paternity cases

1841, 1851 and 1861 Census

Search on-line today 

www.maxwellancestry.com

Maxwell Ancestry, a member of the Scottish Genealogy Network