Collins Tracing your Scottish family history
Anthony Adolph

Collins

To our very good friend Dean Laurent de Bubier

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1: Getting started

Chapter 1: How to start your family tree

Chapter 2: Archives and organizations

Chapter 3: Scotland’s names

Chapter 4: Know your parish

Part 2: The main records

Chapter 5: General Registration

Chapter 6: Censuses

Chapter 7: Church registers

Chapter 8: Religious denominations

Chapter 9: Testaments, deeds and other useful records

Part 3: How they lived

Chapter 10: What people did

Chapter 11: The burghs

Chapter 12: Landholders

Chapter 13: Farmers and crofters

Chapter 14: Clans and tartans

Part 4: Comings and goings

Chapter 15: Emigration

Chapter 16: The origins of Scotland’s people

Chapter 17: Genetic evidence

Useful Addresses

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

This book was written to mark the 250th anniversary in 2009 of the birth of Robert Burns, the Ploughman Poet, whose words captured the spirit of the Scottish nation. His anniversary year has been declared Scotland’s Homecoming Year, which aims to encourage Scots all over the world to come back to visit, and to assure them of a warm welcome when they do.

To come home you need to know where you come from. Underpinning Homecoming Year is genealogy, the study of family trees or pedigrees, and its associated discipline of family history, the study of the stories behind the pedigrees. In many countries, computerization of records has rocketed genealogy from a minority interest into an immensely popular obsession. But in Scotland, knowing your roots is nothing new. Right back in the sixteenth century, the French joked of any Scotsman they encountered ‘that man is the cousin of the king of the Scots’, for that was what he would surely claim. A rather more cynical view was penned in the mid-eighteenth century by Charles Churchill (1731-64), in his ‘Prophecy of Famine’: ‘Two boys, whose birth beyond all question springs From great and glorious, tho’ forgotten kings, Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred On the same bleak and barren mountain’s head…’

With a population of just over five million, there are many parts of Scotland where the ubiquitous sheep are more easily found than people.

Sarcastic, yes, but accurate, for many of the widespread Lowland families and Highland clans were indeed founded by scions of Scotland’s ruling dynasties, be they in origin Pict, Briton, Gael, Viking or Norman. And such knowledge was not lost, especially in the Gaelic-speaking parts, when ancestors’ names were remembered through the sloinneadh, the patronymic or pedigree, in which two or more – often many – generations of ancestors’ names were recited, and which was a natural part of everyone’s sense of identity.

Such essential knowledge was threatened, diluted, and sometimes lost by migration, whether to other parts of Scotland or over the seas in the white-sailed ships. Nonetheless, it results today in many people all over the world being able to point at a particular spot on the map of Scotland and say, ‘that is home’.

This book is for those who can’t, but want to, or who can but want to learn more. I know that many aspects of genealogy such as DNA and nonconformity can seem terribly complicated, and that some specific aspects of Scottish genealogy (such as services of heirs, wadsets and precepts of clare constat) seem to have been designed purposely to intimidate the faint-hearted. And, given the great amount of contradictory information flying about, does your Scottish surname actually indicate that you belong to a clan, or may wear a tartan, or doesn’t it?

I hope this book will help guide you through these issues, to develop a much fuller understanding of your Scottish family history, and to find your own way back, so to speak, to your Scottish home.

Abbreviations

FHC | Mormon Family History Centres
GROS | General Register Office of Scotland
NAS | National Archives of Scotland
NLS | National Library of Scotland
NRAS | National Register of Archives of Scotland
SGS | Scottish Genealogy Society
SHS | Scottish History Society
SoG | Society of Genealogists (London)
SRS | Scottish Record Society
TNA | The National Archives (Kew, London)

Future meets past: old Ally Alistair MacLeod was a Highland crofter, descended from Viking chieftains. His tiny granddaughter Moira Hooks was born after her mother (whose sister is shown here) had moved away to Glasgow. Now she and her descendants all live in England. This picture captures the only time they ever met (courtesy of the MacLeod Family Collection).

Old family photographs provide the perfect backdrop to your research, helping bring the past to life.

PART 1 Getting started

The very first steps in tracing your Scottish family history are to talk to your relatives and keep a note of what they tell you. This section suggests what to ask, and how to record your growing store of information about your family tree. The next step is to identify archives or organizations, which are introduced in this section. Before diving any deeper into your research, it is helpful to gain a background understanding of Scotland’s geography and naming systems.

CHAPTER 1 How to start your family tree
Ask the family

The first resource for tracing your Scottish family history is your own family. Meet, email or telephone your immediate relatives and ask for their stories and copies of old photographs and papers, especially family bibles, old birth, marriage and death certificates or memorial cards. Even old address books can lead you to relatives worldwide, who will be able to extend your family tree. Disappointingly, old photographs seldom have names written on the back: they may show your ancestors, but they are anonymous. Old ones often show the photographer’s name and address, and some firms’ records are in local archives. Directories (see p. 88-9) can show when the photographer was trading, helping to give the photograph a rough date, and the mere location can be a clue as to which side of your family is being depicted. And, please, write names on the back of your own photos, to save future generations this frustration, or even include a family tree in your own photo albums, to show who’s who.

This photograph of Catherine and Jane Wilson in 1923 is usefully marked on the back ‘Drummond Shields Studio, Edinburgh’, thus suggesting the area where these girls may have grown up (courtesy of Jane’s daughter-in-law, Helen Taylor).

When you interview a relative, use a big piece of paper to sketch out a rough family tree as you talk, to keep track of who is who. Structure your questions by asking the person about themselves, then:

• their siblings (brothers and sisters)

• their parents and their siblings

• their grandparents and their siblings

…and so on. Then, ask about any known descendants of the siblings in each generation. The key questions to ask about each relative are:

• full names

• date and place of birth

• date and place of marriage (if applicable)

• occupation(s)

• place(s) of residence

• religious denomination, whether Church of Scotland, Free Church, Catholic, Jewish, and so on.

• any interesting stories and pictures.

Next, ask for addresses of other relatives, contact them and repeat the process. Once you know the name of a village where your ancestors lived, try tracking down branches of the family who remained there, for people who

Sennachies

Before Christianity and literacy came to Britain, a special class of Druid, the seanachaidh or sennachie, memorized and recited the royal sloinneadh or pedigree. Long after other forms of Druidism had fallen away, sennachies remained, some as villagers who remembered the local family histories, others in the clan chiefs’ households. In about 1695, Martin Martin wrote in A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (Birlin, 2002):

‘Before they engaged the enemy in battle, the chief druid harangued the army to excite their courage. He was placed on an eminence, from whence he addressed himself to all of them standing about him, putting them in mind of what great things were performed by the valour of their ancestors…’

Martin, who used the term ‘marischal’ for the chief’s sennachie, also said he was,

‘obliged to be well versed in the pedigree of all the tribes in the isles, and in the Highlands of Scotland; for it was his province to assign every man at table his seat according to his quality; and this was done without one word speaking, only by drawing a score with a white rod which this marischal had in his hand, before the person who was bid by him to sit down; and this was necessary to prevent disorder and contention; and though the marischal might sometimes be mistaken, the master of the family incurred no censure by such an escape.’

It’s good to know that, occasionally, we genealogists were allowed to get it wrong.

Dr Johnson (1709-84), the London essayist and lexicographer who travelled around Scotland with the writer James Boswell in 1773, had trouble finding whether the bard and sennachie were different people, or one and the same, though he acknowledged different customs may have prevailed in different places: touring the Hebrides, he found that neither had existed there for some centuries. However, we do remain: Lord Lyon is High Sennachie of Scotland, and all genealogists worth their salt have inherited their share of this ancient Druidic mantle.

Aristocrats, such as John Campbell, fourth Duke of Argyll, shown in this painting by Thomas Gainsborough, have always had the help of sennachies or genealogists to record their family history.

have never left may know a lot about the ancestors you have in common, and might have tales about your forbears who migrated away.

What you are told will be a mixture of truth, confused truth and the odd white lie. Write it all down and resolve discrepancies using original sources. Watch out for ‘honorary’ relatives. Whilst writing this, I received an email telling me, ‘I recall as a boy, being introduced to people named to me as Uncle Ned, Auntie Jo, and Cousin Francis. Many years later, I found during my family history searches that none of them were in fact relatives, just very close friends at that time. Yet the oldest relative I was interviewing still described them as Uncle, Auntie, and Cousin, even under my challenge, with the result that I spent many weeks searching records for these people as relatives, and I never found any of them – but I eventually did find them as ordinary individuals shown as living in the same neighbourhood.’

Photographs of family holidays are particularly valuable when people used the time to retrace their roots. Alexandrina (‘Alice’) MacLeod left her ancestral home in Badnaban, Sutherland, to become a servant in Glasgow, marrying Walter Hooks there in 1935. They came back on holiday, bringing along Walter’s parents: here she is with her parents-in-law and sister Annie at nearby Achmelvish. There is more on tracing the roots of this family on pp. 50-1. (Photo courtesy of MacLeod Family Collection.)

The internet

Genealogy has been revolutionized by computers, bringing data and even images of records to your own home and, more significantly, making them really easy to search. Being able to look at the whole Scottish 1851 census online is useful: being able to search it in seconds for your great-granny is revolutionary. Scotland has led the way in making its national records accessible and searchable online, and the website www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk is a unique resource that has changed the face of Scottish genealogy for ever. It is your great good fortune to be tracing your Scottish family history now.

Computers are readily available in libraries or internet cafés (or friends’ houses!). If you don’t use the internet already, I would strongly recommend learning from a friend or joining a class, as it will make tracing your Scottish roots vastly easier. If you absolutely can’t bear the idea, ask an internet-savvy friend or relative to do your look-ups for you.

LEFT: A page from www.genesreunited. com showing a list of references to ancestors called Lachlan MacLeod. You can tell which may be relevant by the years and places of birth: by clicking on the name you can send an email to the person who submitted the information.

There are several excellent websites that put like-minded genealogists in touch with each other, particularly the British-based www.genesreunited.com, though sites such as the American www.onegreatfamily.com will contain many families of Scottish descent too. You enter names, dates and places for your family, and the sites tell you if anyone else has entered the same details. When new people join and enter the same relatives, they’ll easily find you. It’s a new method, that really works.

RIGHT: The front page of the ScotlandsPeople website.

Doctor Who’s Dutch cousin

TOP: The marriage proclamation of David Tennant’s great-great-great-grand parents in 1824 reads: Alexr McDonald and Isabella King, both of this Parish, Paid 4s/ to the poor’s funds. No Objections offered Proclaimed 31st Octr 7 Novr This entry employs a number of abbreviations, for the months and also Alexander’s name. It was found on the ScotlandsPeople website, but only after using the Soundex option (see p. 49), as he was indexed as ‘Alexr’, not ‘Alexander’.

LEFT: David Tennant.

Joining a contact website such as Genes Reunited is seldom a waste of effort. Kenny Graham, who lives in the Netherlands, had been tracing his mother’s MacDonald family tree since about 1990, and a few years ago put it on Genes Reunited. His children never took much interest in it until an email arrived from me. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Kenny, ‘Daddy’s “boring” hobby became cool.’

I was tracing the family tree of David Tennant, the West Lothian-born actor who is the latest incarnation of science fiction hero Doctor Who. David’s real name is David MacDonald. His father, Alexander, Moderator of the Church of Scotland, was the great-grandson of John MacDonald, son of Alexander MacDonald, a road labourer at Kilmadock, who married Isabella King at Lecropt, Co. Perth, in 1824.

I wanted to see if David had any relatives out there, so I looked these ancestors up on Genes Reunited, and found their names had been entered by Kenny, whose great-great-grandfather Peter MacDonald was another son of Alexander and Isabella’s.

‘I couldn’t believe it when we got the email,’ said Kenny, ‘because it is not every day you find out that David Tennant is your fourth cousin!’ His son Ben, nine, was even more excited: ‘When I told my friends a few believed me but most of them didn’t. It seems a bit different watching David on TV now because I try to imagine what he is like in real life.’ His sister Kirsty, aged seven, said, ‘I was really surprised when I found out. My friends didn’t believe me but when they found out it was true they were amazed. My friends and I made a Doctor Who Club at school where we talk about the last episode.’ Kenny told me that ‘this experience has helped us greatly in keeping the children aware of their “Scottishness” and also brought to life my hobby to my siblings.’

RIGHT: The Graham family (courtesy of K. Graham).

Original records

Original records are usually held in the archives of the organization that created them, or in public repositories, local or national. As it is not always practical to visit an archive, there are other options:

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also called the Mormon Church, has an ever-growing archive of microfilm copies of original records from all over the world, including Scotland, many of which are indexed on the Mormon website www.familysearch.org. Founded in 1830, the Utah-based church has a religious mission to trace all family trees, and they hold ceremonies that allow the deceased to become Mormons, should their souls desire. They have Family History Centres (FHCs) in most major towns: find your nearest at www.familysearch.org. FHCs are open to all – entirely without any compunction to convert – and here you can order any microfilms to be delivered from the Mormon’s Family History Library in Utah.

2. Many Scottish records have been published, as indicated where appropriate in this book, especially by the Scottish History Society (SHS) www.scottishhistorysociety.org and the Scottish Record Society (SRS) www.scottishrecordsociety.org. Volumes can be bought, examined in genealogical libraries, or ordered through interlibrary loan.

General Register House, Princes Street, Edinburgh, where the ScotlandsPeople Centre is housed.

3. You can hire a genealogist or record agent. Genealogists like myself charge higher fees and organize and implement all aspects of genealogical research. Record agents charge less and work to their clients’ specific instructions, for example: ‘Please list all Colquhouns in the Old Parochial Registers of Oban between 1730 and 1790’. Most archives have a search service, or a list of local researchers. Many advertise in genealogy magazines or at www.genealogypro.com, www.expertgenealogy.com and www.cyndislist.org, and some belong to the Association of Scottish Genealogists and Researchers in Archives, www.asgra.co.uk, whose members charge a minimum rate of £20 per hour, though membership does not guarantee quality. The NAS website has links to some genealogists on www.nas.gov.uk/doingResearch/remotely.asp.

Most professionals are trustworthy, and many offer excellent services, though ability varies enormously. Generally, the more prompt and professional the response, and neater the results, the more likely they are to be any good. Hiring help is not ‘cheating’: if you only want one record examined but are not sure it will contain your ancestor, it makes no sense to undertake a long journey when you can pay someone a small fee for checking for you, and a local searcher’s expertise may then point you in the right direction anyway.

4. By using the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh and its website. In the ‘Old Days’, the only way to trace Scottish family history was to go to New Register House, Edinburgh, and search the indexes to births, marriages and deaths (from 1855), and the censuses (currently from 1841 to 1901), and then walk round to the National Archives of Scotland to examine the Old Parochial Registers (that can go back to the 1500s) and testaments (also from the 1500s).

Storing information

A family tree of the Campbell Clan, drawn as a real tree, complete with trunk and branches, from The House of Argyll and the Collateral Branches of Clan Campbell (1871) – courtesy of SoG.

Some people enjoy using family tree computer programs. A comparative table of those available is at www.My-history.co.uk. Many are based on the transferable ‘Gedcom’ format, so once you have typed in your data you can move it between programs, including the one used in Genes Reunited.

Others (like me) aren’t so keen: most have limitations, or pester you for ‘vital data’ that you don’t have, almost forcing you into making misleading assumptions. Many demand dates of birth, marriage and death. From 1855 onwards in Scotland this is all very well, as these are very well recorded. Before then, however, Old Parochial Registers (and most non-Established church registers) can record baptisms, not births, and proclamations, not marriages, and few programs make allowances for such subtleties, resulting in people entering the former as the latter. Just recently I saw a Family Group Sheet giving a death date of 5 July 1617. The evidence was a burial dated 6 July 1617, and my poor client, browbeaten by the computer’s demand for a date of death, had simply guessed that the burial was the day after the death – which is in fact rather unlikely.

I prefer hand-writing family trees and keeping more detailed notes in computer ‘word’ documents. The following ‘narrative’ method allows much flexibility:

Alexander Matheson

Write everything you know about Alexander. Then write ‘his children were’ and list them:

1 Donald Matheson, the next member of the direct line, so after his name type ‘see below’

2 Alexander Matheson. Put anything you know about Alexander and his descendants here. If he had children, then write ‘his children were:

1 Hamish Matheson.

2 James Matheson: if he had offspring, then…

1 Jean Matheson

3 Margaret Matheson. If you have absolutely loads on Margaret and her descendants, you might want to open a separate ‘chapter’ for her and put her at the top of her own narrative document.

Donald Matheson, son of Alexander.

Write what you know about Donald, and so on.

Since 2002, however, these records have become available on www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk. This is run by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS), the National

Archives of Scotland (NAS), the Court of the Lord Lyon and an internet company, Brightsolid. You purchase a block of credits using a credit or

Pedigree conventions

• = indicates a marriage, accompanied by ‘m-’ and the date and place.

• solid lines indicate definite connections: dotted lines indicate probable but unproven ones.

• wiggly lines are for illegitimacy (though straight lines are now acceptable) and ‘x’ for a union out of wedlock.

• loops are used if two unconnected lines need to cross over, just like electricians’ wiring diagrams.

• wives usually go on the right of husbands, though only if that doesn’t interfere with the chart’s overall layout.

• Common abbreviations are:

b. | born
bach. | bachelor
bpt. or c. | baptized or christened (same thing)
bur. | buried
d. | died
d.s.p. or o.s.p. | died without children
d.v.p. or o.v.p. | died before father
inft | infant
m. | married
MI | monumental inscription
m.i.w. | ‘mentioned in the will of…’ followed by f. for father, gf. for grandfather and so on.
m. proc. | marriage proclamation
spin. | spinster
test. | testament
unm. | unmarried
wid. | widow or widower (as appropriate)
w.wr./pr. | will written/proved

debit card, and spend them making searches and viewing digital images of the records themselves. Searching the index to wills and testaments is free but you pay to view an image of the document. At the time of writing, the site contains the following material:

• Statutory (General Register Office) Registers: Births 1855-2006; Marriages 1855-2006; Deaths 1855-2006.

• Old Parochial Registers: Births and Baptisms 1553-1854; Banns and Marriages 1553-1854.

• Censuses: 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901.

• Wills and testaments: 1513-1901.

If, by the time you use the site, more material has been added, all well and good!

Births, marriages and deaths are indexed up to nearly the present day, but for privacy reasons, digital images are only available up to 100 years ago for births, 75 years ago for marriages and 50 years ago for deaths, though you can order ‘extracts’ of these from GROS, or examine the originals at the ScotlandsPeople Centre.

The website works out more expensive than visiting the archives in Edinburgh, but if you don’t live nearby then www.Scotlands People.gov.uk is a godsend. Besides bringing indexes to your computer, it has indexed the indexes, making the searching process vastly easier than ever before. And, because it’s now possible to view images of the original documents online, people across the globe can now trace their Scottish ancestors properly. This has encouraged many new people to start exploring their Scottish roots.

Take a few minutes to explore the site’s extra features. There are fairly detailed explanations of the records, and ‘Research Tools’ contains many helpful features, such as tips on reading old handwriting and understanding old money.

The calendar

Up to 1582 Britain and Europe used Julius Caesar’s calendar, with years starting on Lady Day, 25 March, but that year many Continental countries started using the calendar of Pope Gregory the Great, with years starting on 1 January. King James VI and I ordered the adoption of the Gregorian calendar starting on 1 January 1599/1600, and now that the year started in January, not March, New Year quickly absorbed many surviving pagan Winter Solstice traditions, creating the great Scots New Year festival of Hogmanay. Although James became king of England and Ireland in 1603, the calendar there did not change until 1752.

Dealing with written records

Reading old handwriting is called palaeography. Old ways of writing, or simply bad handwriting, present a real problem for genealogists. You can learn to read the former, but ghastly scrawls can defeat the most seasoned professional. For old hands, see G.G. Simpson’s Scottish Handwriting 1150-1650 (Tuckwell Press, 1973) and A. Rosie’s Scottish Handwriting 1500-1700: a self-help pack (SRO and SRA, 1994).

www.scottishhandwriting.com offers online tuition on old handwriting, and there are palaeography classes available elsewhere, especially at the ScotlandsPeople Centre.

Older records in Latin can be off-putting, but you can always pay a translator or experienced genealogist. Good guides to Latin include R.A. Latham’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-list from British and Irish Sources (OUP, 1965), and there is a useful list of Latin words used in genealogical documents at www.genuki.org.uk. Here are some basics that appear in legal documents:

• | Annus | year
• | Dies | day
• | Eod. die. | same day
• | Est | is
• | Filia | daughter
• | Filius | son
• | Inter alia | amongst others
• | Mater | mother
• | Matrimonium | married
• | Mensis | month
• | Mortuus | died
• | Natus | born
• | Nuptium | married
• | Obit | died
• | Parochia | parish
• | Pater | father
• | Pro indiviso | undivided
• | Qua | as
• | Sepultat | buried
• | Uxor | wife
• | Vide | see
• | Vidua | widow

This extract from a nineteenth-century sasine or land grant is relatively easy to read: earlier documents can be harder to follow.

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.

CHAPTER 2 Archives and organizations

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.

Edinburgh

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.

Archives across Scotland

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:

Edinburgh addresses

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 National Register of Archives of Scotland

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.

Genealogical Societies

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.

The GOONs or Guild of One Name Studies (Box G, 14 Charterhouse Buildings, Goswell Road, London EC1M 7BA, 0800 011 2182, www.one-name.org) includes many members studying Scottish surnames.

Scottish family history societies can be found via Genuki (see p. 33) or the Scottish Association of Family History Societies on www.safhs. org.uk. The latter publishes much of local interest and members can be funds of local lore. Many family history societies in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas, incidentally, have Scottish-interest groups, and there are Scottish Societies, including strong genealogical elements, in many countries. The Netherlands, for example, has a flourishing Caledonian Society (www.caledonian.nl) whose members are mainly descendants of Scots sailors, soldiers and merchants who settled in the Dutch ports.

Most Scottish clans now function through clan societies, that are effectively family and social history societies, as described on p. 160.

Though not really a ‘society’, www.rampantscotland.com is an American website providing copious links to Scottish-interest sites, including travel, cooking, clans and history. The genealogy links page is worth exploring.

Seallam!

The Seallam! Visitor Centre, and its founders, Bill and Chris Lawson, with their fantastic files of island pedigrees.

A fine example of a small local archive is Bill and Chris Lawson’s Co Leis Thu? (which means ‘what people do you belong to?), housed at the Seallam! Visitor Centre, An Taobh Tuath (Northton), Isle of Harris, HS3 3JA, 01859 520258, www.seallam.com.

Realizing that the fantastic oral history surviving amongst the Gaelic speakers in the Hebrides was threatened by the spread of English, Bill learned Gaelic and approached as many Gaelic speakers as possible. Few were willing to talk on tape or even in front of a notebook, so he had to remember what he heard, and record it later. He combined the results with close scrutiny of the available written records. Of these, he comments,

‘Written records in the Islands are generally poor, and were often kept by incomers with no knowledge of Gaelic, and even less interest. Oral tradition, on the other hand, comes from within a community and is much more likely to be accurate, even though it does tend to me more localized. Neither by itself is a complete record, but if the two are amalgamated, a more complete picture emerges, sometimes with surprising results…’

None more so than in the wonderful cases of people who could recite their patronymics – their father’s name, followed by their grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, and so on. Some patronymics also appear in written records (albeit with rather odd attempts at transliteration), such as parochial registers. Bill says, ‘It can take some patience to recognize John Mcoil vicunlay vicormett as Iain macDhomhnaill mhic Fhionnlaidh mhic Thormoid – John son of Donald son of Finlay son of Norman,’ though of course the effort is entirely worth it as, in this case, it provides a four-generation pedigree.

The main records to which he tried to link oral pedigrees were the census returns, which are theoretically complete. Onto this dual peg, Bill could then hang any other information available – civil registration, parochial registers and so on. The results are astonishing – over 10,500 pedigree sheets, each neatly drawn out in immaculate handwriting, covering all the families of the islands of the Outer Hebrides (Harris, Lewis, Barra, North and South Uist and the smaller associated islands). As the 1851 census includes the elderly, many of these pedigrees go back to the late 1700s.

Bill’s main clients (he makes his information available for a very modest fee) are descendants of the islands’ many late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emigrants. Some Lewis and Harris sheep farmers went as far as the Falkland Islands and Patagonia, but most Lewis people went to eastern Quebec and Bruce County, Ontario, later ones making for the Gaelic-speaking areas already colonized by their kin, whilst Uist and Harris people set sail for Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, and from 1850s onwards to Australia. Judging by where they settled, Bill often has a head start working out where they would have originated. Sometimes there are clues in the emigrant communities, reminding us that our ancestors lived in extended families, and that we should always look beyond the narrow confines of our direct ancestral lines. Thus, MacDonalds on their own may be fairly ubiquitous, but MacDonalds mixed with Steeles indicate migrants from South Uist (where the surname was adopted by a group of MacLeans who wanted to disguise their identity from some vengeful Campbells: they chose Steele simply as it was the boat’s skipper’s surname).

Local knowledge, however you can acquire it, from older relatives, local history books, websites or local archives and resource centres like Seallam! is an invaluable clue to unlocking your Scottish family history.

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