Illegitimate births & Kirk Sessions

[Lady Macbeth]

Hi all,
I seem to have a lot of unmarried parents on one side of my family, however, I have managed to get back to 1797 where a son is born to two individuals who do not seem to have ever married.  I have a note of the baptism with 'illegt'.  The father then seems to disappear completely.  Unfortunately, as he was an Ag Lab in Angus, he was bound to have moved around every 6 or 12 months anyway.

My question is to anyone who has looked up the Kirk Sessions in Edinburgh.  I believe, in situations like this, the elders took the father to task and expected some form of child support from him.  If so, surely this would have been recorded in the Kirk Sessions.

Can anyone advise what, if anything, I may find if I look at the Kirk Sessions at the time of the baptism/birth.  Has anyone else tried this route?  Any advice would be welcome as getting to Edinburgh is not easy for me.

Incidentally, this illegt son, who became a ploughman, then went on to be reprimanded by a minister in another parish in 1826 for 'antinuptial fornication'.  I believe this indicates the birth outside marriage of my ggggrandfather.  At least he and the mother seem to have married later.

Many thanks
Lesley

[Chevalier]

Lesley:

Quoting you ...

"My question is to anyone who has looked up the Kirk Sessions in Edinburgh.  I believe, in situations like this, the elders took the father to task and expected some form of child support from him.  If so, surely this would have been recorded in the Kirk Sessions.

Can anyone advise what, if anything, I may find if I look at the Kirk Sessions at the time of the baptism/birth.  Has anyone else tried this route?  Any advice would be welcome as getting to Edinburgh is not easy for me."

The good news is that it was indeed recorded ... in a Kirk Session's "Book of Discipline."  The bad news is that, speaking from first hand experience, you are not likely to find them anywhere except in their respective parish kirk or manse or in the hands of the Session Clerk.

Over the last thirty odd years I have needed to access these books for three parishes in Perthshire and one in Stirlingshire none of which were archived in Edinburgh.  In the Stirlingshire case it was kept by the incumbent Session Clerk at his home as it was in one of the Perthshire parishes while in another it was in a storeroom at the kirk and in the last it was at the manse.  In all of these cases I was told that the books had been asked for by the Church of Scotland's central office in Edinburgh decades before but the request(s) had been ignored.  Perhaps the Church of Scotland still holds the Books of Discipline which were delivered into its safekeeping by cooperative parishes if they have not turned them over to the care of Register House.

What you will find if you can locate a Book of Discipline is a gold mine!  The individual Kirk Sessions went into far greater detail over the birth of a natural [illegitimate] child within their respective bounds than they ever did for a legitimate birth.  In the latter record in a parish register, at most, there will be the child's gender, given name, parents' names and their place of residence with maybe the names and residences of some witnesses to the baptism.  In the Book of Discipline you will get all of that plus the names and locations of other relatives (grandfather, uncle ... etc.) who had to contribute financially not to mention the parents' testimony as to the circumstances of the case.  Well worth the effort to find these books.

Sometimes a telephone call to a parish minister or Session Clerk will turn up such a book and a look-up without much more ado.  One time (the manse above) I wrote and received a reply that though the minister had the book my ancestress did not appear in it.  Later that year, when I could drive up to the central Highlands, I stopped by the manse and was permitted to look for myself ... I found her with pages of information.  The most important data was getting both of her grandfathers' names and their farms from which I was able to push back three more generations.

Good hunting!

Terrance
   

[OzKat]

Thanks to Terrence and Lesley for these posts because it has given me further hope that I have another source of information with which to solve the mysteries in my family.

I have two young women in the same family who both appear to have "got knocked up" by ag labs (different ones) who they never married. The result of one of these dalliances was my great great grandfather who took great pains to cover it up. I am pretty confident I know who his father was but because this man went on to have another fairly respectable family and business at a later date, I'd like to be more sure of my facts.

Hopefully the suggestions you have made hold true for Morayshire and that I have some luck.

Regards,
Kath 

[casliber]

I too (likely) have an illegitemate ancestor in Skene Aberdeenshire - just clarifying, the Book Of Discipline is separate to the Kirk Session records?
cheers
Cas

[Kate NZ]

Great thanks for the info i too have several illegitimate ancestors so hopefully the Book of Discipline can be found Harriet

[ibi]

I too (likely) have an illegitimate ancestor in Skene Aberdeenshire - just clarifying, the Book Of Discipline is separate to the Kirk Session records?
cheers
Cas

Cas

Not necessarily!

In some sessional records there will be the full details of parishioners being called before the session, possibly over a period of many months if the mother and alleged father refused to provide the necessary information.  In other words, in these cases, there may not have been a separate Book of Discipline.

The good news is that the sessional records of the Established Church of Scotland (NAS ref CH2) and those of the Free Kirk which amalgamated with the ECoS in 1929 (NAS CH3) are in the process of being digitised, and will then be indexed, including probably in terms of type of event that appears in the session minutes.

As the digitised images are produced they are already available on the internal computer system at NAS' General Register House.

ibi

[Grothenwell]

Thanks to all for a very interesting post indeed. I'm sure this information would help lots of us out.

My questions are, if anyone can help shed light.

Is there an index or list of what Kirk sessions are where. ie is there a listing of what is held in Edinburgh? Also if they are still held at the individual Kirks, how do you track down which Kirk the session or book of discipline might be in if you only have the parish name mentioned in the OPR?

Thanks,

Grothenwell

[ibi]

Thanks to all for a very interesting post indeed. I'm sure this information would help lots of us out.

My questions are, if anyone can help shed light.

Is there an index or list of what Kirk sessions are where. ie is there a listing of what is held in Edinburgh? Also if they are still held at the individual Kirks, how do you track down which Kirk the session or book of discipline might be in if you only have the parish name mentioned in the OPR?

Thanks,

Grothenwell

I was worried someone might ask that question  as the answer is far from straightforward.

Basically, 95+% of Established Church of Scotland (ECoS) sessional records are held at National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh, either in the form of the originals (currently being digitised) or microfilms of originals which have been sent back to regional archives.  A look at the index on the NAS website will let you know what they hold.

The complication starts to creep in where sessional minutes etc. were regarded by the holder as more personal than official, and never made it to NAS.

There are even worse complications in terms of the various secession churches.  While NAS holds a good number of such records, there are many others in local archives around the country.  Again have a look at the NAS index. 

There is a UK national project on the go to bring together via one portal site the indexes of the holdings of all archives.  See http://www.scan.org.uk/ for Scotland.

Finally, those Free Kirk congregations (and successor schisms) who didn't take part in the amalgamation in 1929 with the Auld Kirk (ECoS) may never have deposited their sessional and other records with any archive.

I'm led to believe that the British Section of the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City completed a project around a year ago to document and list every extant Scottish church record, in the form of 3 looseleaf binders in the library, - but you'll have to visit Salt Lake City to consult this!, - and I'm not aware of any immediate plans to make this available in a different format, e.g. a CD.........


Sources such as Groome's Gazeteer and the Second or New Statisitical Account (Google for the University of Edinburgh website that has the full text of this) are good sources of the various churches in a parish.

The Church of Scotland website at http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/ is one place to start in terms of establishing the location of present day churches.

The Free Church website is at http://www.freechurch.org/

The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland is at http://www.fpchurch.org.uk/

The United Free Church of Scotland is at http://www.ufcos.org.uk/

The Scottish Episcopal Church is at http://www.scotland.anglican.org/

The Free Church of Scotland [continuing] is at http://www.freechurchcontinuing.co.uk/

ibi

[Chevalier]

Cas:

Quoting you ...

"I too (likely) have an illegitemate ancestor in Skene Aberdeenshire - just clarifying, the Book Of Discipline is separate to the Kirk Session records?"

Yes, but I have only gone looking for a parish Kirk Session Book of Discipline in the four cases I mentioned previously and in each of those parishes there was both a Parish Register [listing baptisms and marriage banns] and a Book of Discipline which is basically the minute book [minutes] of the meetings of the parish Kirk Session.

By the way, these minutes also include the accounts of the Session (called "Charge and Discharge") where one may find, amongst other items, the income derived from the rental of the parish's Mort Cloth to cover a casket at a funeral.  This has twice provided me with an approximate death date for ancestors whose monumental inscriptions could no longer be read.

Terrance