Records, as you are finding, don't always make themselves available when you need them!
One of the main problems that you are having here is that many of the events you are trying to find are before the start of official registration in Scotland from 1855 onwards. Records before this year will be from, in the main, the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) which as you have already found were most often mininal info/one liners.
The OPRs record events from the established Church of Scotland - i.e. presbyterian.
There are lots of reasons why you may not find birth or marriage entries in these registers, not exclusively due to:
- family belonged to a different religeous denomination and any remaining records may not be avaible on line for this.
- registers lost or destroyed over the years.
- it cost money to register these events, many families could not afford to do so.
Don't be so surprised that at the time of Isaac's death his parents were shown as unknown to the informant. I am right in thinking that by the time Isaac died, wife Isabella had also already died? Over the years, the informants to deaths (if family to the deceased) could forget this info and not uncommon.
Monica
