Prior to the first of January 1855, the established Church of Scotland was charged with the task of registering the births, marriages and deaths occurring in Scotland. Each parish had to keep registers. While it was compulsory for the Church of Scotland to keep these registers, there was no legal requirement for people to make use of them for registering births.
What tended to happen in practice was that the Session Clerks of each Parish wrote down the baptisms (Christenings) carried out by the parish minister within their parish. Sometimes the actual dates of birth were added. Sometimes the register was kept as a birth register with the baptismal dates added. Practices varied from parish to parish. Some session clerks were more conscientious than others. Handwriting standards (and spelling!) vary greatly. Many registers have gaps for a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to ecclesiastical disruption, and a few volumes have been lost.
It was unusual for members of denominations other than the established church to register their children's births in the OPR (Old Parish Register) for their parish, though they were entitled to. A few parishes (Balfron is an example) kept a section of their registers for "Seceders" (i.e. members of Presbyterian churches that had broken away from the established church), but very few entries will be found for Scottish Episcopalians or Roman Catholics. These churches, as did some of the Secession churches, tended to keep their own registers as part of their own ecclesiastical administration. There are very few pre-1855 records of births of children born to non-Christian parents in Scotland.
The following imaginary pages in the Othertown Parish register have been found as an imaginary follow-up to the census information illustrated on the Census 1851 to 1901 page, where Ivan Othername was said to be 31 years old in 1861, and born in the Parish of Othertown. A record has been found in the Old Parish Register of Births/Baptisms for the year 1829...
A few points should be noted relating to the above imaginary OPR page:
- The size of volume kept by different parishes varied, and therefore so did the page size and the number of entries per page.
- The format of the entries given above is fairly typical, but there were considerable variations. We are lucky here to have entries with actual birth dates, and all details of date are pretty clear. Sometimes you may have to scrutinise a number of adjacent pages to find the year and month referred to in the particular entry that interests you.
- Not all registers have a separate column for the surname, and therefore take considerably longer to scan and search.
- "D.L." means "daughter lawful"; "S.L." means "son lawful", and "lawful" means that the child was born within wedlock - i.e. the parents were already married.
- In some registers, particularly further back in time, the mother's name was not given, amazing though it may seem to us nowadays. This was not so much "sexist" as a lazier session clerk merely writing down enough (and no more) to identify the family. Usually when the mother's name was omitted, the residence was given, and often no residence was given in entries mentioning both parents.
- "Nat.D" in the above example stands for "natural daughter"; that is to say that the mother was not married to the father at the time. In these cases the father is rarely mentioned. Those searching the above Wronged family have at least the consolation of the mother's father's name being recorded. In all the other examples there is no recorded link to parents of the parents, or to any marriage date.
- The father's occupation was not regularly given. There might even be inconsistency on the one page, as in our imaginary examples above.
- Lucky people will come across sections of registers where helpful session clerks have given all the elements of information in the above imaginary example, along with the position of the child in the family and maybe even the names of witnesses, some of whom could be relatives.
Find out where to get Parish Register information. Go to our Old Parish Register Sources page.
Although we can't be sure that the marriage of Noah Othername and Ann Strangeneme was recorded in the Othertown Parish Register, it is undoubtedly worth looking, and you can see the result of this imaginary check in the OPR Marriages page, which is where you are encouraged to go next.
