John Richardson

[Forfarian]

Never trust anything you find on Ancestry unless it's an image of an original document. Especially don't trust online trees. They're great as a starting point but you need to verify every connection to make sure you're not following someone else up a wrong tree.

[Richsmith]

I know, I’ve used ancestry for quite a few years and know the pitfalls well. I’ve also had to make a few leaps of faith based on hunches which have usually proved correct. My mum was a smith, my dad a smith, my mum’s mum was born a smith, my mum’s grandfather is a smith, her dad was a Smith. Plus they had a propensity for marrying their cousins! Sometimes you just have to read between the lines 🙄

[Forfarian]

I know, I’ve used ancestry for quite a few years and know the pitfalls well. I’ve also had to make a few leaps of faith based on hunches which have usually proved correct. My mum was a smith, my dad a smith, my mum’s mum was born a smith, my mum’s grandfather is a smith, her dad was a Smith. Plus they had a propensity for marrying their cousins! Sometimes you just have to read between the lines 🙄

Ouch! I have lots of cousin marriages, but not, thank goodness, with popular surnames, and mostly in Scotland where the civil records are so much better than they are in the rest of the UK.

[Richsmith]

Now I think I’ve narrowed it down I need to search a bit more to see if George and Jean are Johns parents. Are the Scottish records arranged in a similar fashion to the English ones? I don’t even know where to start 🤔

[Forfarian]

Now I think I’ve narrowed it down I need to search a bit more to see if George and Jean are Johns parents. Are the Scottish records arranged in a similar fashion to the English ones? I don’t even know where to start 🤔

Not quite sure what you mean, but start at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

The statutory civil records are far better than the English/Welsh/Irish ones.
- a Scottish birth certificate tells you the date and place of the parents' marriage.
- a Scottish marriage certificate tells you the maiden names of the couple's mothers.
- a Scottish death certificate tells you the names of the parents of the decease, including the deceased's mother's maiden name (assuming that the information knew all this, of course).

They are also more accessible, because you can download instantly an image of a historic Scottish certificate at a quarter of the cost of getting an English one, for which you have to wait a few days before it arrives.

However you are really looking for information before the start of civil registration, so I won't go into that in detail.

The main difference between the Scottish and English records is that the vast majority of the Scottish ones are available in one place, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. All the surviving registers of the Church of Scotland were collected in Edinburgh at the start of civil registration, and they form the bulk of the church registers at SP.

SP also arranged to make the surviving Catholic registers available, and they are the next largest set of church records available on SP.

Lastly there are many of the registers of all the assorted other churches including the Free Churches, most of which are now in the National Records of Scotland.

The records that are missing from SP are
- Episcopalian/Anglican - their surviving registers are in the individual churches, or in diocesan, university or local archives, and I have yet to come across any sort of list or catalogue telling me which Episcopalian registers survive and where they are.
- a small number of registers of dissenting churches whose congregations have not given permission for their registers to be made available on SP.
- registers that have been lost. Occasionally one of these turns up, but this is rare.
- non-Christian records.
- any other registers not in the care of the National Records of Scotland.

There are lists of which registers for which parishes/churches survive and are included in SP at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/guides/church-registers

However just because a register has survived does not mean that it will contain every baptism or marriage that occurred in that parish. There are several reasons why the record of an event has not survived, including
- the parents did not bother to have the child baptised
- the parents did not ensure that the baptism was recorded in the register
- the clerk neglected to enter the information in the register
- the register was damaged

Sometimes the information in the church registers is a bit sparse - I've seen baptism records with no information in them other than the father's name, and marriage records occasionally list only the groom's name and nothing else.

The really important point to remember is just because there is only one possible candidate in the records does not mean that this is the person you are looking for.

Does that help?

[Richsmith]

Absolutely, thank you very much 👍