Wisdom Wednesday: Scottish Games and Festivals

Last weekend, I went to my local highland games. I am still humming the tune played by all of the pipe bands in the competition. While I didn’t spend a lot of time doing genealogy, I could have.

These games featured a tent with genealogists from the Mormon Church who were doing individual counseling. They did two workshops during the day, one “Basics of Genealogy” and the other “Genealogy and Your Scottish Records.” Not all games will have this element, but if you are headed to one, check the schedule on their website before you leave home. Only pack your genealogy notes and questions, if you can consult with a genealogist.

On the other hand, every Scottish festival has clan tents or booths. These are almost always together and separate from the vendors and food purveyors. Most of the booths have some info for family researchers, if only a map* and list of septs (branch families). I saw some pedigree charts Saturday so some genealogy was taking place. I did observe that visitors had to talk to the clans people and not wait for them to begin the conversation.

As my program said, in that combination of English and Scottish perhaps spoken or written only in North America:

“Search for a bit o’ yer ancestry ‘neath ane o’ the mony clan tents.”

For information about the larger highland games that might be near you, consult the website of the Association of Scottish Games and Festivals: www.asgf.org. Next year’s Glasgow Lands Scottish Festival will be in Look Park, Northampton, Massachusetts Saturday, 18 July 2015, www.glasgowlands.org.

* To find where your surname is most prevalent in Scotland, consult the Great Britain surname project, University College, London, at www.gbnames.publicprofiler.org

Wisdom Wednesday: Scottish/English Borderlands to Rural America

From 1717 to 1775, 275,000 people came from the border counties in England and Scotland to settle the northern and western areas of the American colonies. Some acted as a buffer between the Native Americans and the settlers on the seacoast. The skills and mindset from over 700 years of violence on the English/Scottish border served them well.

During the reign of KIng James I of England (James VI of Scotland) from 1603-1625, the first king of all of Great Britain gave people in the border area peerages and land in Northern Ireland to try to calm the troubles. Thus the Scots/Irish were created. They are not welcomed by the Irish, and as we know, there are still problems today.

One way to avoid the troubles was to emigrate. One hundred fifty thousand people came from ports in Northern Ireland in the sixty years before the American Revolution. The seaports were Belfast, Londonderry, Newry, Larne and Portrush. Another 75,000 came from ports in Scotland including Wigtown and Kirkcudbright. The northern English ports where another 50,000 immigrants departed were Liverpool, Maryport, Morecambe and Whitehaven. These immigrants had two things in common. First, they all lived on or near the Irish Sea, the body of water between Great Britain and Ireland, or they were former residents of that area or the borderlands

A study of the surnames in the 1790 U.S. Census showed that these immigrants went to all the colonies except the small coastal places - Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. The largest concentration was in southwestern Pennsylvania, and western Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Later their descendants would settle in large number in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Source: Dollarhide, William. British Origins of American Colonists, 1629-1775. Bountiful, Utah: Heritage Quest Genealogical Services, division of AGLL, Inc., 1998. ISBN 1-877677-69-8

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.

Wisdom Wednesday: Gazetteers of Scotland

Genealogy is an ever-changing field. Now we are not only concerned about the major events in our ancestors’ personal lives but in the history of their communities and their relationship to major national and international events.

A gazetteer describes places within a country or area, but not all of these reference books are equal. In 1846 and in a second edition in 1851, Samuel Lewis wrote A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland, an alphabetical listing of the then 33 shires and all the parishes, villages and hamlets in the country. It is filled with facts, history and statistics. For example, here is part of the entry for Abercorn from his work:

“ABERCORN, a parish, in the county of Linlithgow, 5 ½ miles (E. by N.) from Linlithgow; containing the villages of Newtown and Philipstown, about 950 inhabitants. This place which derives its name from the situation at the influx of the small river Cornie into the Firth of Forth, is of very remote origin. Its ancient castle occupied the site of a Roman station between the wall of Antonine and the port of Cramond on the Firth, in the harbour of which the Romans moored their ships...”

The website www.visionofbritain.org.uk has a small map when you search for Abercorn that shows the villages of Newtown and Philipstown when you put 'Abercorn' in the search box on the home page.

Frank Smith condensed the information from Lewis’ book and added a few other sources in the 1970s for his book, A Genealogical Gazetteer of Scotland. His entries include the location and population of a village in 1851. In separate lists, he gives the years and locations of parish registers for Church of Scotland and non-conformist congregations. Here is the entire entry from the Genealogical Gazetteer:

 “ABERCORN parish 1585 Linlithgow 5 ½ m e Linlithgow pop 950 Free Church” (Smith, A Genealogical Gazetteer of Scotland, page 1)

The Free Church mentioned were a group that left the Church of Scotland in 1843 and had a congregation there, but according to Lewis, the Abercorn parish of the Church of Scotland had an ancient church which was enlarged in the mid-1500s. Now we might eagerly relish the details of the longer entries in the Lewis book.

Sometimes we want to know where a village is immediately and other times we want a slow stroll through the history of a place. It seems both books and the website have their uses.

Sources:

Lewis, Samuel. A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland. Original issued in 1846, reprinted Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1989.

Smith, Frank. A Genealogical Gazetteer of Scotland. Logan, Utah: Everton Publishers, Inc., 1971.

Note: Frank Smith is the compiler of the two-volume set A Genealogical Gazetteer of England, Logan, Utah: Everton Publishers, Inc, 1977.

Wisdom Wednesday: Other Names for Paupers

Did you know that paupers were also called collectioners and bearmen/bairmen? The first of these terms is used today, that is, in books written in the late 1990s and the early 2000s about poverty in Britain. However the term bearman or bairman sent me googling with interesting results.

Googling ‘bearman’ found a host of men’s clubs and references to hirsute men. Looking for “bairman” got one hit in a glossary of ‘peculiar words’ in a book called, Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh: AD 1403 -1589. The Extracts includes an alphabetical list of names contained and a list of topics covered in the records of this period. The third and last section is the glossary which defines bairman as an insolvent debtor. This book is downloadable as a PDF from Google Books. There are options for ipads and ereaders as well.

If you are intrigued by the glossary of words from the 15^th and 16^th century but wish there were indexes to the records of other cities, you will be happy to find that the Extracts are a series which includes Glasgow, Leith, Stirling and others. Edinburgh is Volume 5, first published by Scottish Burgh Records Society in 1892.

Wisdom Wednesday: Scottish Parish Records

Have you ever wondered if there was an online alternative to ScotlandsPeople for Scottish parish records? This is a question posed recently at a UK Special Interest Group meeting. It seems wise to check www.ancestry.com  and www.familysearch.org  first. Then I recommend consulting The Scottish Association of Family History Societies at www.safhs.org.uk.  

Because it is free at most public libraries, I will describe how to find out if www.ancestry.com has any parish records for Scotland on the library version of the program. On the home page, under the box asking you to input a name, there is a list of censuses on the left and to the right a list of other databases. There is the phrase ‘all databases’ at the very end of the second list. Click on those words, and it will bring you to a screen where on the left you can enter ‘Scotland’ as a Keyword. Although far from a specialty, a few databases are available, including Roxburghshire, Scotland, Extracted Parish Records.

On the home page of www.familysearch.org, scroll down to ‘Browse by Location’ and click on ‘United Kingdom and Ireland.’ From the list on the left, select ‘Scotland’ with eight databases listed; six are the Scottish Censuses from 1841 to 1891. The other two show some promise – one is Scotland, Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950 and the last is Scotland, Marriages, 1561-1910. Although the two databases contain almost 11.5 million records, familysearch clearly states that they represent only a fraction of all the records while being unclear about what parishes or districts are included.

Another avenue to pursue is the transcriptions done by local volunteers and posted on the sites of local Family History Societies. Much of this work is online in the ‘Members Only’ section of a Society’s website.  

First go to www.safhs.org.uk and see if there is a Family History Society that covers your geographic area of interest. There should be a link to the local society’s website. Membership in these groups tends to range from £10 – 20 per year. Not every group clearly advertises what is in their ‘Members only” section. I suggest you email them and ask if they have the parish records you want.

I recently found the inscription on my great great grandmother’s tombstone in the ‘Members only’ section of the Norfolk Family History Society’s website. I stood in the cemetery one cold rainy October day and must have missed it. Perhaps it was in the rear with the high wet grass - the part I gave up on.  Moral - Never give up.

Wisdom Wednesday: Scottish Research Sources

Like all genealogical research abroad, language is an issue when looking in Scotland. On September 19, 2012, I wrote about www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk and http://www.dsl.ac.uk, two potent sites in your Scottish search. Today I’d like to review these sites and add a few more that contain glossaries that will help you.

If you go to ScotlandsPeople and click on “Research Tools” and then “Help & Resources”, you can find three glossaries. There are separate lists for medical terms, occupations and ‘unusual’ words.

The Dictionary of the Scots Language at http://www.dsl.ac.uk is a growing site and the most comprehensive of them all.

However, sometimes we need something just geared to our present research. If you need terms from legal documents defined, try www.scan.org.uk/researchtools/glossary.htm.  This is the site of the Scottish Archive Network. The other research tools under this tab are a currency converter, family history guide, and weights and measures.

For place names, try The Gazetteer of Scotland at www.scottish-places.info, a site created by the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In the upper left side, chose ‘Glossary’ from the list. Here are the definitions for brae and cairn. Notice the old maps, and archaic and modern descriptions of places also. As the site’s home page says, find the “bens and glens from the Scottish Borders to the Northern Isles.” 

The Scottish government has a similar website at www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk. In the upper right, you can search for a place by name by typing in a town or parish. Directly under that at the extreme right is a place to click ‘Scotland A to Z’ to view a list of place names, not a glossary. To find out some definitions of terms used, look to the list on the left of the home page and click ‘Scottish Place Names’. Here you can find out what a Royal Burgh is.

©2013, Susan Lewis Well

Wisdom Wednesday: Scotland’s People Website

ScotlandsPeople is celebrating its tenth anniversary this month. It is a huge site with over 90 million digital records and images. Even as the staff takes a moment to savor its longevity, there are plans to post records of wills from 1902 to 1925. Congratulations!

I have one Scotsman in my family tree, Andrew Bruce Stewart. If I could find his parents and birthplace I would be one happy genealogist.  ScotlandsPeople is the best website for me to begin my search. Its URL is www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. Since it is a pay site, The first things I want to know are what is available without paying and how much it will cost to search for my GGgrandfather.

First, I need to log in at the top right of the home page – no payment required. Just under the log in area are five tabs – search the records, about the records, help and resources, FAQs, and features. I click on the ‘about the records’ tab and select ‘records availability’ from the dropdown menu. There is a chart of what indexes and images are available on the website. There are few that are free, but don’t be upset.

ScotlandsPeople is notable because it has indexes and images of most of its records. It has the censuses from 1841–1911. Civil Registration began in 1855, and the site has indexes for birth, marriages and deaths (BMDs) from that date to 2009, which are called the Statutory Registers. Because of privacy laws, the actual images can be viewed as follows: births, 1855-1911; marriages, 1855-1936; deaths, 1855-1961. ScotlandsPeople has indexed records of Church of Scotland, called Old Parish Registers and some catholic church registers beginning in 1553 to 1854. The site has a Valuation Roll from 1915. A segment is called ‘Free Search Records’ and includes wills dating from 1513 to 1901 and coats of arms.

What is Free?

Like many sites, information about the databases, directions for using the site and general genealogy tutorials are free. I found a few interesting things.

There is detailed information about each record group held so click on the “Search the Records” tab and then ‘Old Parish Records’. There you will find a description of the records of the established church, the Church of Scotland. In the 3500 registers that have been deposited are the BMD records, baptisms, banns and burials before 1855. However, “Registration in Church of Scotland's registers was costly and unpopular, so many people did not bother to register events at all.” In the early 19^th century, it was estimated that only 30 percent of the events in urban areas were recorded.

Under the tab ‘Help and Resources’, c lick ‘Getting Started.’ Near the bottom, you will see links to two topics I have posted about before. One is the Scottish Association of Family History Societies at www.safhs.org. It has a list of all the local societies around the country so you can contact or join the one that could be most helpful to you.

The last sentence on the screen states, ‘Handwriting help is available here.’  By clicking on the word ‘here’ you will be taken to a screen titled ‘Handwriting Help’ which is somewhat misnamed because it contains two links, only one about handwriting and the other vocabulary. The first link is to the Dictionary of the Scots Language (Dictionar o the Scots Leid) at www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/index.html.  The following from their website:

“The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary (SND). DOST contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and SND 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. These are therefore essential research tools for… historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots…”

The second link is to www.scottishhandwriting.com. There is a one-hour basic tutorial along with three more specific ones in the category ‘tutorial’ in the list on the left of the home screen. Before leaving the main page, you might want to click on ‘this week’s poser’. The one for 5 Sep 2012 is a baptism certificate from Edinburgh which is quite challenging.

What is the cost?

The site runs on credits. You buy credits with your credit card, and when they are used up, you buy more.  The charges are detailed under the ‘About Our Records’ tab; click ‘charges.’

For seven Great Britain pounds (7 GBP), you receive 30 page credits that are good for one year. The Statutory Records, Old Parish Records, Catholic Records and Censuses cost one page credit for an index page with 25 results and five page credits for an actual image. The description of the process of charging for viewing an index page sounds complicated to me, but I haven’t used it yet.  I quote from the Scotlandspeople website:

·         Charges for index-searching are based on the number of pages actually displayed, not on the number of records retrieved.

·         Each time you do a search, you are told how many records have been found; each record refers to a specific event, ie a particular birth/baptism, marriage or death.

·         Before displaying the records, you have the opportunity to re-define, and narrow the search, without displaying the results.

·         If you decide to view these records, they are displayed in pages each containing a maximum of 25 records. One page of results costs 1 credit.

It is free to view the index to wills and coats of arms. Images of wills can be purchased with 10 credits no matter the length. A coat of arms image is 10 GBP per document.

ScotlandsPeople Centre
General Register House
2 Princes Street
Edinburgh
EH1 3YY

A companion website answers questions for those who want to visit the Centre in Edinburgh: www.scotlandspeoplehub.gov.uk

I am going to spend time looking for Andrew Bruce Stewart now. If I find him or have insights on  using ScotlandsPeople, you will hear from me soon.

©2012, Susan Lewis Well