FindmyPast adds Dumfriesshire burial records

The latest additions to FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) this week:

Scotland, Will and Testament Index 1481-1807
Did your ancestors die in Scotland? Explore this index of more than 164,000 records from the commissariat courts of Scotland between 1481 and 1807. Each record includes a transcript of the original will and testament that will reveal the date of the will and where it was made.

Scotland Monumental Inscriptions
Over 112,000 new records covering all of Scotland are now available to search. The latest updates include 9 burial sites across Dumfriesshire - Cummertrees Churchyard, Dalton Graveyards, Kirkconnel Churchyard, Kirkpatrick Fleming, Langholm Old Graveyard, Lochmaben Old Churchyard, Staplegordon Graveyard, Staplegordon Graveyard, Wauchope Graveyard and Westerkirk Churchyard.

Westmorland Parish Records
Three brand new parish record collections from historic English County of Westmoreland are now available to search on Findmypast, including:
·  Westmorland Baptisms – over 39,000 records that will reveal details such as baptism date, parents' names and residence.
·  Westmorland Marriages – Over 22,000 records listing details such as marriage date, spouse’s name, father’s name and place of marriage.
·  Westmorland Burials – Over 9,000 records that enable to discover your ancestor’s final resting place, age at death, burial date and residence.

International records update – The Philippines
Does your family tree have roots in the Philippines? Search thee new indexes covering births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials spanning the years 1642 to 1994 are now available to search of Findmypast.

British & Irish Newspaper Update
This week’s new titles include two Scottish publications, the Arbroath Guide and the Perthshire Constitutional and Journal, daily London title, the Express and the Sheerness Times Guardian.

Further details and links at https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/new/search-new-uk-parish-records--scottish-wills-this

Chris

Order Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Family-History-on-the-Internet-Paperback/p/16483. My next Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the OPRs course starts 4 November 2019 - see https://www.pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=302. Further news published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

FamilySearch adds English and Welsh National Probate Calendar

FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) has added a new database:

England and Wales, National Index of Wills and Administrations, 1858-1957
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2451051

This collection is the National Probate Calendar for England and Wales, it is an index to wills and administrations from 1858-1957.

The National Probate Calendar is the English and Welsh equivalent of Scotland's Calendars of Confirmations and Inventories, with the confirmation process down south known as 'probate'.

FamilySearch's index is free to search, but to view an image for further details you will need to visit a LDS family history centre, or affiliate centre.

UPDATE: Thanks to David Wharton via The GENES Blog facebook page, for the following important additional point:

"And they have also indexed the Executors or Administrators, incorrectly described as Beneficiaries [although they might also be one]. They give the deceased's name and the probate date, so it is then easy to go to the official site probatesearch.service.gov.uk to see the index. For 1858 to 1925 you can see the actual registered copy of the will at a Family Search Library."

Chris

Pre-order Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) for just £11.99 at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Family-History-on-the-Internet-Paperback/p/16483. Details of my genealogical research service are available at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. Further news published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

ScotlandsPeople service announcement

Second time lucky, hopefully, for the launch of the new ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) website:

Service announcement for the ScotlandsPeople website

ScotlandsPeople will be offline from 23.59 (BST) on Wednesday 21 September until Monday 26 September. This downtime is essential as we work towards the launch of our new ScotlandsPeople website.

Customers visiting the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh or using one of the local family history centres will be able to access records as usual on Thursday 22, Friday 23 and Monday 26 September 2016.

You will be pleased to note that once the new site is launched, all of your credits and saved images from our existing site will be available.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you and thank you for your patience.

Thank you.

(With thanks to ScotlandsPeople)

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Beginner's Guide to British and Irish Genealogy, A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.

Ancestry updates National Probate Index

Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) has updated its England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations) database to include coverage from 1973-1995, adding to the already existent coverage for 1858-1966. The collection can be searched at http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=1904.

Don't forget that calendar entries for England and Wales can also be searched at https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk, where copies of wills or administrations can be ordered at a price of £10 per record. Once paid for you will have 31 days to download the record, though you may have to wait a few days for the record to become available for digital download following your order.

For equivalent Scottish calendar entries, visit Ancestry's Scotland, National Probate Index (Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories), 1876-1936 database at http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=60558.

For Ireland, see my page on Irish probate at http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/ireland-probate-calendars.html.

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.

Scottish Calendar of Confirmations 1876-1936 joins Ancestry

Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) has uploaded an immensely useful new dataset for those with Scottish connections - Scotland, National Probate Index (Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories), 1876-1936. In essence this is Scotland's equivalent of the English and Welsh based post-1858 National Probate Calendar.

From the site:

About Scotland, National Probate Index (Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories), 1876-1936
This collection includes an index and images to the annually published Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories filed in Scotland for the years 1876–1936. In Scotland, probate records are called confirmations and they include a testament and an inventory of the estate. The testament is the court record ordering distribution of the deceased’s estate. Some included wills (testament testamentar) and some did not (testament dative), the latter being more common.

Not everyone filed testaments, as many chose to skirt the courts and just settle the moveable property within the family. The wealthy were more likely to have filed, simply because they had more property to distribute. But regardless of your ancestor’s social standing, it is worth a quick search to find out.

The calendar, which began publication in 1876, is separated into a different volume for each year. The entries in each volume are then alphabetised by surname. Information varies across different entries, but each typically includes:

• testament date
• full name of the deceased
• death date and place
• name of an executor (often a relative, but sometimes a creditor)
• where and when the testament was recorded

Information on ordering copies of testaments and inventories can be found on the ScotlandsPeople website

The word 'probate' is actually not used in Scotland, the process here is called 'confirmation', hence the collection title in brackets (I suspect it has been given the title 'Scotland, National Probate Index' to cater for non-Scots based genealogists more familiar with that term). The full range of actual print published calendar volumes in fact goes beyond 1936 to 1959, with additional microfiche and digitised indexes beyond even this accessible at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh - however, this collection was sourced from the A. K. Bell Library in Perth (www.pkc.gov.uk/AKBell), which holds volumes up to 1936 only. Although there is a single volume available for each years from 1876-1920, for surnames from A-Z, the subsequent years each have two volumes, one for surnames from A-L, the second from M-Z.

Note that whilst the entries contain records from the Scottish courts (and records re-sealed from other UK courts), they may note events beyond Scotland and the UK. For example, the following is an entry for my civilian shopkeeper great grandfather David Hepburn Paton, who actually passed away during the German occupation of Brussels in Belgium, in 1916 (click to enlarge):

What also makes this collection particularly useful, and something not actually explained in Ancestry's own blurb, is that the available digitised records run on the ScotlandsPeople website (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) in fact ends at 1925 - meaning that this Ancestry collection uniquely provides confirmation details online from 1926-1936.

The database is accessible at http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=60558.

For more on Scottish confirmation records, and the subject of Scottish inheritance in general (with a very different set of legal proceedings to those found elsewhere in the UK) please consult my article in the latest Who Do You Think You Are? magazine (November 2015 - http://whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com). Please note that in that article, however, the provisional web link to the collection as given to me by Ancestry when writing the article a month back is inaccurate - so please access it via the link above!

(With thanks to Bryony Partridge)

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/.

Scottish First World War soldiers' wills go online

News of the latest addition to ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk):

Historical Wills of Scottish Soldiers Go Online

The last wishes of Scottish soldiers at the Front: The National Records of Scotland release Soldiers’ Wills from WW1, WW2, the Boer War, Korean War and other conflicts between 1857 and 1964

The wills of 31,000 Scottish soldiers are being made available online by the National Records of Scotland as part of commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. The poignant documents include the last wishes of 26,000 ordinary Scottish soldiers who died in the Great War.

The new records contain the wills for ancestors of some famous Scots. For instance, John Feeley, the great-great-grandfather of the Paisley musician, Paolo Nutini, is included. Private Feeley served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and died of wounds sustained during the Battle of Arras on 23 April 1917. Feeley left all of his property and effects to his wife, Annie, who lived until 1964.

Researchers at the National Records of Scotland have also discovered the will of Andrew Cox, the uncle of Dundee-born actor, Brian Cox. A rope-worker before the war, Private Andrew Cox served with the Highland Light Infantry and was killed in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, aged 22 - sadly, his body was never identified. Like many unmarried soldiers, Andrew Cox left all of his possessions to his mother, Elizabeth.

The records are drawn from all the Scottish infantry and cavalry regiments, as well as the Royal Artillery, Royal Army Medical Corps, Royal Army Service Corps, the Machine Gun Corps and other units, and a few who served in the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF. Almost all the wills were written by soldiers below officer rank, but some wills for commissioned officers are also included.

In addition to the wills from the Great War, there are almost 5,000 from Scots soldiers serving in all theatres during the Second World War, several hundred from the Boer War and Korean War, and wills from other conflicts between 1857 and 1964.

Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs in the Scottish Government, said:

“These small but powerful documents are a testament to the sacrifice in wartime made by thousands of Scots, not only the soldiers themselves, but also their families and loved ones.”

Tim Ellis, Registrar General and Keeper of the Records of Scotland, said:

“We are privileged to be marking the centenary of the start of the First World War by making these remarkable records available. They give us a unique insight into the service of Scottish soldiers during the First and Second World Wars, but also in other conflicts before and since.”

Annelies van den Belt, the CEO of DC Thomson Family History, who enable the ScotlandsPeople website on behalf of the National Records of Scotland, said:

“We’re very pleased to add this new set of records to the ScotlandsPeople site. These fascinating documents make for poignant reading and we’re sure that anyone who views the wills will feel a strong emotional connection to those who lost their lives in these conflicts.”

The Soldiers’ Wills are available at www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh, and at local family history centres in Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Hawick and Inverness.

Image - the First World War will of Andrew Cox, uncle to actor Brian Cox. Photo courtesy of the National Records of Scotland.

NB: For the rest of what was the UK at this point - Irish First World War wills are freely available at http://soldierswills.nationalarchives.ie/search/sw/home.jsp; for England and Wales, visit pay-to-use site https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/. Some UK soldiers' wills are also calendared (abridged) in the National Probate Calendar on www.Ancestry.co.uk.

(With thanks to Grant Millar at DC Thomson Family History)

Chris

Now available for UK research is the new second edition of the best selling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians, whilst my new book British and Irish Newspapers is also now out. And FindmyPast - please reinstate the original Scottish census citations on your new site.

Scottish soldiers wills to go online in May

Several press reports emerged yesterday announcing that the wills of some 26,000 Scottish soldiers from the First World War were to be made available online, as part of the commemorations for the conflict's centenary. A typical report from Newsnet Scotland, running the press release, is at http://newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/in-brief/8783-wills-of-scottish-soldiers-killed-in-wwi-to-be-made-available-online.

These wills have been available in a digital format for some time at the National Records of Scotland's Historic Search Room in Edinburgh, and are catalogued on the site's online catalogue at www.nas.gov.uk/onlinecatalogue.

One thing missing from the coverage, however, was an indication of when they would appear online. I have since contacted the NRS to ask them just that, and they have replied that it is the intention to make them available at some stage in May of this year, though an exact date has as yet to be confirmed.

At present it is possible to trace English and Welsh soldiers' wills from the First World War via a new payment based service at https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/, whilst Irish soldiers' wills from 1914-1917 are freely available at http://soldierswills.nationalarchives.ie/search/sw/home.jsp, with the coverage to extend soon to include wills from 1918-1922.

(With thanks to @NatRecordsScot)

Chris

My latest genealogy books are Tracing Your Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), Discover Scottish Civil Registration Records, and Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet. My next Pharos course is Scottish Research Online, which commences Feb 27th 2014, 5 weeks, price £45.99.

Sheriff court closures in Scotland

Ten sheriff courts in Scotland have been earmarked for closure, as part of changes being introduced to the Scottish Courts Service. They are as follows:

• Arbroath (business moving to Forfar)
• Cupar (business moving to Dundee)
• Dingwall (business moving to Inverness)
• Dornoch (business moving to Tain)
• Duns (business moving to Jedburgh)
• Haddington (business moving to Edinburgh)
• Kirkcudbright (business moving to Dumfries)
• Peebles (business moving to Selkirk)
• Rothesay (business moving to Greenock)
• Stonehaven (business moving to Aberdeen)

From a genealogy point of view this will have an impact for those wishing to access copies of confirmation records (the equivalent of probate records elsewhere in the UK) at a local level from sheriff courts.

Scottish confirmation records prior to 1926 can be accessed on ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) whilst records and indexes from 1926-1986 are available at the National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk). The most recent records, however, are still held at local sheriff courts. It is possible to obtain copies of these records from any of the sheriff courts, or from HM Commissary Office in Edinburgh. Details of all of the courts can be found at www.scotcourts.gov.uk.

The BBC has more at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22215741

Chris

My new book, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet, is now available from Pen and Sword. For my other genealogy books, please visit  http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html; whilst for my online Scottish based genealogy courses please visit the Pharos Teaching and Tutoring Ltd site.