Scottish civil registration death certificates, established as a legal requirement from the first of January 1855 for any death occurring in Scotland, are a particularly important source of genealogical information. The main reason for this is that the informant is asked to supply the names of both parents of the deceased, and this information is recorded. This is not the case with death certificates in England and Wales, or Ireland.
This means that if you are looking at, for example, an 1858 Scottish death certificate of a person who died aged 88 and who was therefore born about 1770, then the parents who are mentioned on the certificate would have been born around the time of the 1745 Jacobite uprising!
We have now to imagine that we have used birth and marriage certificates following on from those in our birth certificate page and marriage certificate page, and have discovered that:
- Robin Somebody was born in 1865;
- His parents Norman J.L. Somebody and Emma Success were married in 1858;
- Norman's full name was Norman John Love Somebody;
- Norman's father's name was Isaac Somebody, colliery manager, and his (Norman's) mother's name was Marie Orr Els;
- Norman's father, Isaac, was not said to be deceased at the time of Norman's marriage, and was therefore assumed to be alive then.
Carried along on a wave of enthusuasm, you have successfully located Isaac Somebody's death certificate in 1859. Here it is:
Some points about death certificates are worth noting:
- In the 1860s, the name of a spouse of the deceased was included, and this would have read "Somebody, Isaac, colliery overseer, widower of Marie Orr Els".
- There are variations on how specific the given place of death is.
- The age given should be treated with caution. The informant may not have been sure. Be particularly wary if the informant is, for example, merely a neighbour or friend.
- The parental information given here is very full. It is probably correct, but may not be in every detail. It is not uncommon to get incomplete information here, or very inaccurate information where the informant thought they knew the facts, or guessed, or even made it up to save face! There are examples, especially in the early years of registration and where the deceased is elderly, of this section being left blank. This would be a bit of a blow.
- If a parent of the deceased is also deceased, this fact is invariably given even where not indicated as a requirement in the column heading.
- The medical details of cause of death vary greatly in precision and how technical the terms were. It is not uncommon, especially in rural areas in earlier years of registration, for there to be no medical attendant, and for the cause of death to be given as something like "decline" or "old age".
- The burial information column was removed in the 1860s.
