Scottish Indexes Conference XXVI - Saturday 23 November 2024

Interested in tracing your Scottish genealogy? The Scottish Indexes Conference is an opportunity to learn new research skills, discover diverse records and see how others have put these into practice, and is on this weekend. If you want to trace your Scottish family tree, this is an event for you.

Don’t live in the UK? No problem. The conference is live from 7 am to 11 pm UK time to make the conference time-zone friendly. Each presentation is shown twice, once between 7 am and 3 pm UK time, then again between 3 pm and 11 pm. You can come and go throughout the day.

Presenters :

'On the Boll: agricutural and landholding terminolgy in Scottish records' by Robert Urquhart

'Housing the Miners' by Kay Williams

'Town and Gown – St Andrews University Archive' by Sarah Rodriguez

‘Historic Scotland in the archives: Using Historic Environment Scotland Archives to explore historic sites around Scotland’ by Joseph Waterfield

'Using the internet & PRONI for Northern Irish research' by Chris Paton

'Beyond ScotlandsPeople: Breaking Down Brick Walls in Scottish Research' by Alison Spring

Scottish Genealogy Q&A hosted by Graham and Emma Maxwell

Schedules & Handouts

Conference schedules are posted in a variety of timezones. Following the conference, any handouts provided by the speakers will be available on the website. Scottish Indexes also offer handouts from previous conferences via their Past Conferences page.

Scottish Indexes Conference

 

The next Scottish Indexes online conference will be held on 10 July 2021 via Zoom and Facebook, as a sixteen-hour event to incorporate global time differences.

The conference is hosted by genealogists Graham and Emma Maxwell.  In order to make their conferences time-zone friendly they start at 7 am UK time and keep going until 11 pm UK time.. Each presentation is shown twice, once between 7 am and 3 pm, then again between 3 pm and 11 pm. You can come and go throughout the day. This years' conference includes:

•  ‘Merchant and Trades House Records’ by Dr. Irene O’Brien
•  ‘Tracing Scottish Women’ by Kirsty Wilkinson
•  ‘Tracing Scottish Ancestors Before 1855’ by Alison Spring
• ‘Overcoming Brickwalls: Case Studies’ by Emma Maxwell

The event also includes a Q&A session where attendees can pose questions to the panel of experts.

Registration is free on Zoom and Facebook. Follow the directions at Scottish Indexes.

Scotlands People

ScotlandsPeople has announced that thousands of volumes of historical records from the collections of National Records of Scotland (NRS) are now available online for the first time.

Images of more than a million pages from the kirk session and other court records of the Church of Scotland can now be viewed and downloaded. These records contain details of key events in communities across the country between 1559 and 1900 and are one of the most important sources for Scottish historical research.

You are able to browse through the kirk session records for free, only using credits when you would like to save an image, as these records are made available without intensive indexing of their contents by personal name, place or other subjects.

ScotlandsPeople have also produced a series of guides to help you understand how to use the records and how to navigate the virtual volumes system. 

Statistical Accounts of Scotland

The Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online provides access to digitised and fully searchable versions of both the Old Statistical Account (1791-99) and the New Statistical Account (1834-45). These detailed parish reports, written by Church of Scotland ministers, detail social conditions in Scotland and are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Scottish history.   They note basic details about the parishes in question: the industries that were followed, the religious denominations present, the names of key landholders, the topography of the area, and even the nature of the inhabitants themselves.

You can search with a place name or a keyword, for example Glasgow or mills, then click on the map. A new map will open where you can click on any county, to see the parishes in that county. You can then select a parish and view the available reports.

The website allows basic searches for free and charges a subscription fee for access to additional features such as print and download, the ability to tag and annotate pages and many more. Otherwise the service is run on a not-for-profit basis and the subscription fees only cover the cost of hosting and maintaining the website.

Pastmap - maps of Scotland

Have you discovered PastMap yet?  Pastmap is a free website allowing researchers to view information about the archaeology, architecture and landscapes of Scotland on one single map. It is managed by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) along with partners from local government and archaeological curators, and holds data from a growing number of other sources.

You can look at different layers, such as local authority Historic Environment Records (HERs), or Listed Building data from HES. You can choose to display layers on a map or aerial photograph and you can turn the layers on or off. Use the search or zoom tools to explore the map and delve into historic sites across Scotland.

When you find a site of interest – like a standing stone, a castle or a designed landscape – click on it to show more detail in the sidebar. Select a group of objects by drawing a shape or circle around them. Once you have made your selection, you can download a report of up to 1,000 records to view later.

Different types of maps include

• Modern.  Look at the locations of Scotland’s sites and monuments superimposed on today’s Ordnance Survey and OpenStreetMap bases
• Historic - Use historic 19th and 20th century OS maps as a backdrop to historic environment data and look at how the landscape has changed over time
• Aerial - Compare features from the air against what is known in Scotland’s historic environment records, and look in more detail from a bird’s-eye view
• Data - Discover where the archaeology, historic buildings and landscapes of Scotland are, and follow the links to their descriptions and stories

Scotland's Places is now free to search

Big news for those with Scottish ancestors -  the Government-supported website ScotlandsPlaces has removed the subscription fee from its digital collections, meaning users now have unlimited access to millions of historical documents including the following :

Historical Tax Rolls

• Carriage Tax, 1785-1798, (20 volumes)
• Cart Tax, 1785-1798, (14 volumes)
• Clock and Watch Tax, 1797-1798, (2 volumes)
• Consolidated Schedules of Assessed Taxes, 1798-1799 (32 volumes)
• Dog Tax, 1797-1798, (2 volumes)
• Farm Horse Tax, 1797-1798, (13 volumes)
• Female Servant Tax, 1785-1792, (28 volumes)
• Hearth Tax, 1691-1695, (43 volumes)
• Horse Tax, 1785-1798, (33 volumes)
• Inhabited House Tax, 1778-1798 (64 volumes)
• Land Tax, 1645-1831, (129 volumes)
• Male Servant Tax, 1777-1798, (27 volumes)
• Poll Tax, 1694-1698, (88 volumes)
• Shop Tax, 1785-1789, (8 volumes)
• Window Tax, 1748-1798, (218 volumes)

Ordnance Survey Name Books

• Aberdeenshire, 1865-1878, (91 volumes)
• Argyll, 1868-1878, (81 volumes)
• Ayrshire, 1855-1857, (64 volumes)
• Banffshire, 1867-1869, (28 volumes)
• Berwickshire, 1856-1858, (41 volumes)
• Buteshire, 1855-1864, (7 volumes)
• Caithness, 1871-1873, (15 volumes)
• Clackmannanshire, 1861-1862, (7 volumes)
• Dumfriesshire, 1848-1858, (55 volumes)
• Dunbartonshire, 1860, (18 volumes)
• East Lothian, 1853-1854, (55 volumes)
• Fife and Kinross-shire, 1853-1855, (135 volumes) 
• Forfarshire (Angus), 1857-1861, (84 volumes)
• Inverness-shire, 1876-1878, (86 volumes)
• Kincardineshire, 1863, (20 volumes)
• Kircudbrightshire, 1848-1851, (159 volumes)
• Lanarkshire, 1858-1861, (50 volumes)
• Midlothian, 1852-1853, (135 volumes)
• Morayshire, 1868-1871, (23 volumes)
• Nairnshire, 1869, (7 volumes)
• Orkney, 1878-1880, (26 volumes)
• Peeblesshire, 1856-1858, (47 volumes)
• Perthshire, 1856-1858, (79 volumes)
• Renfrewshire, 1856-1857, (21 volumes)
• Ross and Cromarty, 1848-1852, (187 volumes)
• Roxburghshire, 1858-1860, (42 volumes)
• Selkirkshire, 1858, (15 volumes)
• Shetland, 1877-1878, (26 volumes)
• Stirlingshire, ca 1864, (27 volumes)
• Sutherland, 1871-1875, (35 volumes)
• West Lothian, 1855-1859, (69 volumes)
• Wigtownshire, 1845-1849, (88 volumes)

RCAHMS Archives

• Alexander Curle diaries, 1908-1953 (14 volumes)
• Inventories, 1909-1992 (30 volumes)

Burgh registers

• Aberdeenshire Burgh Registers, 1398-1511 (8 volumes)

Official Reports

• Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1891
• Land Ownership Commission Reports, 1872-1873

Published Gazetteers and Atlases

• Hay Shennan, County and Parish Boundaries, 1892
• An Atlas of Scottish History to 1707

Hydrographic Surveys

• Bathmetrical Surveys of Scottish Lochs, 1898-1909

Historic Stirling Poor Relief Records

Stirling Council Archives has uploaded indexes to the Poor Relief records it holds for 14 local parishes : Aberfoyle, Balfron, Balquhidder, Buchanan, Callander, Drymen, Fintry, Gargunnock, Killearn, Kippen, Logie, St Ninians, Stirling and Strathblane.  Various records were kept regarding the local poor, including records of applications, registers of the poor and parish minutes.   Available as PDF files, the searchable documents can reveal the full name of the person who applied for relief, along with their place of origin, marital status and occupation.
Original records, held by the archives, can provide additional information about those who can be found in the indexes.  Visit the Stirling Council Archives for more information, or to see what other treasures they have available.

Scottish Mental Health and Paternity Records

Graham and Emma Maxwell, genealogists at Maxwell Ancestry, have developed the Scottish Indexes website with a wealth of resources to help you trace your Scottish family tree online. They have a large collection of indexes, from unique sources such as prison and court records to more commonly used sources such as birth, marriage, death and census records. While currently many records are from the south of Scotland, their Quaker records and mental health records cover all of Scotland, and more records from other areas of Scotland are to be added soon.

Online record sets include :

• Pre-1841 Censuses and Population Lists
• 1841 Census
• 1851 Census
• 1861 Census
• Mental Health Records
• Prison Registers
• Sheriff Court Paternity Decrees
• Register of Deeds
• Register of Sasines
• Kelso Dispensary Patient Registers
• Non-OPR Births/Baptisms
• Non-OPR Banns/Marriages
• Non-OPR Deaths/Burials

In addition, Scottish Indexes has also set up a dedicated Mental Health Institutions in Scotland homepage, providing historical information and details of locally held archive resources for hospitals that are yet to appear online.  Institutions are indexed by County.

Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories

Do you have Scottish ancestors?  If so, you will probably be interested in the latest database Ancestry has added to their already considerable holdings.
The new database includes an index and images to the Calendar of Confirmations and Inventories filed in Scotland for the years 1876–1936. Ancestry's website tells us that "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."
As with probate records everywhere, not everyone filed testaments for a variety of reasons, especially if they had little to leave. The wealthy were more likely to have filed a Confirmation, simply because they had more money, resources and property to distribute. Regardless of your ancestor’s wealth and social standing however, checking the Confirmations way be well worth your time.
The calendar, which began publication in 1876, is separated into a different volume for each year with 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

Blaeu Atlas of Scotland

The Blaeu Atlas if the first atlas of Scotland, published in 1654.  It contains 49 engraved maps and 154 pages of descriptive text.  You can search the entire atlas or browse for respective maps or descriptions individually, with relevant sections for the north east, west and south of Scotland.  The atlas has been translated from Latin into English for the first time and is available through the National Library of Scotland.

Dictionary of the Scots Language

The Dictionary of the Scots Language comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume "Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue" and the 10-volume"Scottish National Dictionary". Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and Scottish National Dictionary contains information about Scots words in use from 1700 to the 1970s (modern Scots). Together these 22 volumes provide a comprehensive history of Scots, and a New Supplement now (2005) brings the record of the language up to date. This comprehensive resource will help you decipher the old terminology on Scottish records and give up-to-date meanings.

Maxwell Ancestry of Scotland

Maxwell Ancestry had added two new collections to their website. The first collection is an index of paternity cases from the south of Scotland that went before the Sheriffs Court. These are typically cases where a woman gave birth to an illegitimate child and then had to pursue the father of the child through the court for maintenance payments. This is a rare collection that can help researchers overcome brick walls. The collection currently spans the years from 1831 to 1892 for the county of Roxburghshire and intermittently from 1830 to 1897 for the county of Dumfriesshire. Eventually, this collection will cover all of southern Scotland.
The second collection from Maxwell Ancestry is parish records not found on the Scotland’s People website. Specifically, these birth, marriage and death records were taken from Kirk Session material from the Church of Scotland and other Presbyterian churches. Maxwell Ancestry now has some 460,000 records across their various online indexes. There is no charge to search. There is a modest charge to order a full transcript.

National Library of Scotland Directories

The National Library of Scotland now has now reached over 700 digitized post office directories posted online. These directories cover most of Scotland and date from 1773 to 1911. The directories list alphabetically the name of the inhabitants, their address and often their profession. Access is free.  With their alphabetical list of a location's inhabitants and information on their profession and address, the directories enable you easily to find out where people lived at a certain time and how they earned their living.