Wisdom Wednesday: Scotland By the Numbers

In 1851 there were 901 parishes in Scotland with a total population of 2,888,742 people. The country had grown by about 250,000 since 1841, when the population was 2,620,184. Ten years later, in 1861, the population had grown again to 3,360,018.

To get more family friendly facts, you may want to visit the website www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk . Click on the 'Census Timeline' button on the left listing. There you will find a section that highlights each census year with three ‘census facts’ in the areas of population, culture and health.  For 1851, the 'population fact' is that children under the age of fifteen were 36 percent of the total, but now that group is only 15 percent. The population is aging.

The 'health fact' for that decade shows that life expectancy for men was 40 years and for women was 44 years. Worse there was a one in seven chance that a baby would die before its first birthday. That's all a little sobering.

Each section also has a few ‘contemporary historical facts’ – headlines from the decade. In the mid-1850s, “David Livingstone , the Scottish missionary-explorer and human rights campaigner, reaches the Victoria Falls and describes them to a European audience for the first time.”

The 1851 census had a religious component. The Established church was Presbyterian, called the Church of Scotland, and the other groups, including the Church of England (COE), were classified as non-conformist.  The other sects seem to be mostly Quaker, Roman Catholic, COE, and the Free Church. The last is a denomination that broke away from the Church of Scotland in the 1840s.

What was your ancestors’ Scotland like - by the numbers? Your look into their world will be helped by this site.