Saturday, 5 December 2015

Old Scottish Genealogy and Family History adds records online

Penny Lewis and Fergus Smith from Old Scottish Genealogy and Family History have added 150,000 transcribed records to their website at www.oldscottish.com/records.html, free of charge. The duo have stated that they hope to produce the following online:

We are adding hundreds of thousands of extracted historical records to our website - including rolls of male heads of families, baptismal and marriage registers, Kirk Session records and Poor Law records. To see the records currently available for each parish, follow the links below. We don't yet have records for every parish, but remember to keep coming back, as we are adding new records every day.


The majority of records that I have seen on the site so far are the various lists of male heads of households recorded in kirk session registers as required by the 1834 Veto Act, an extremely useful census substitute prior to 1841. Some records simply name the communicant and residence, for example, my four times great grandfather William Paton is recorded as residing at Carscroft in Perth in the records for the East Church parish in 1835. Others may note an occupation, and in some cases some further notes (for example if they have subsequently left the parish). The National Records of Scotland catalogue reference number for the collection is also helpfully supplied for each list.

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including my recently released Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html. My Pinterest account is at https://www.pinterest.com/chrismpaton/.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Chris,

    Thanks for sharing this. Just to clarify, the records currently online are rolls of male heads of families recorded under the provisions of the 1834 Veto Act. We still have a few more rolls to add, which we will do over the course of the next few weeks.

    I'll be blogging a bit more info about them shortly, but we wanted to get the records online first.

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