West Dunbartonshire Libraries have microfilm copies of the Old Parish Registers for the former Dunbartonshire parish districts from Rosneath in the west to Cumbernauld in the east. A complete collection of Dunbartonshire registers on microfilm is kept in the local studies section of Dumbarton Library, which houses the largest local library collection of genealogical research resources. In addition to the Dunbartonshire registers, there are microfilm copies of the Old Parish Registers for the parish districts in West Stirlingshire, such as Drymen and Balfron, and for some of the nearer parishes of Renfrewshire and Argyll.
The Latter Day Saints people in Salt Lake City, Utah, have produced an index to all the Scottish Old Parish Registers. This is available in microfiche format at Dumbarton Library (and some other Library authorities throughout the country), and is divided by County. If you are looking for an individual, it is obviously wise to check the index first to save you trawling through microfilm, perhaps without success. Full contact details for Dumbarton Library are at our ancestry research start page.
All the pre-1855 parish registers for Scotland are kept at the offices of the Registrar General for Scotland in Edinburgh.
General Register Office For Scotland
New Register House
Edinburgh EH1 3YT
Scotland
Tel: 0131-334-0380 Fax: 0131-314-4400
E-mail: records@gro-scotland.gov.uk
Web-page: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/
You can write to this office with a request for an extract from a pre-1855 parish register. However, you would need to have pretty accurate information as to parish and date for the staff to follow up your request. Check with them first. You will also have to pay a search and reproduction fee for each item.
If you can, it is much better to go there as part of your genealogical researches and spend a day there for a single fee. You can view microform reproductions of the old parish registers, and there is on-line access to a Scotland-wide index. At the same time of course, you have access to census returns and to birth, marriage and death certificates should you choose to pay a comprehensive search fee. You can copy down the details you find rather than having to buy transcripts - though you can do that too if expense is not a problem!
The main local authority libraries throughout Scotland (including West Dunbartonshire - see the top of this page) have purchased microfilm of the parish registers for their area. Since access to this kind of material in public libraries is free, then, if you are mainly interested in one place or area and do not need to consult certificates at the same time, it makes sense to go to a library rather than to the Registrar General's Office in Edinburgh. The chances are the library will have relevant census returns too. For Scottish library contact details go to the A-Z of organisations section of the Scottish Libraries and Information Resources (SLIR) website.
A popular method nowadays for access to information about entries in the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) is to go to the Scotland's People web-site where you can consult indexes and see and store images of a great deal of the genealogical sources at New Register House.
http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/
The site has full instructions about how to use it. Basically it involves getting a user name and password, and buying credits on-line using a credit card. The credits are deducted as you access levels of information. Getting documents on-line involves downloading images of them. These can be saved to your hard-disc and printed out. Your credits are time-limited, but if they are not all used within the time limit, the remaining ones will be added to any new credit batch purchase you make.
Note that on-line at this site, as far as the OPRs are concerned, you will only have access, for the moment, to the above-mentioned OPR Index, not to all the information in the microfilmed registers themselves. Searching is more flexible than with microfiche: you can choose date spans and County areas, as well as searching the whole country. You can order full extracts of all the OPR information by filling an on-site application form and paying the appropriate fee.
Other on-line sources for OPR information include the Latter Day Saints (LDS) site where the parish register index information has been incorporated into the IGI (International Genealogical Index). The IGI can be searched on-line in a variety of ways. If you know what you are looking for pre-1855, then try the relevant subsection of the LDS Family Search page. You will have to specify Scotland as this site purports to have world-wide coverage. Any post-1855 results will not derive from Parish Registers.
You can return to one of the pages dealing with the Old Parish Registers by clicking one of the links immediately below:
