Tracing Your Scottish Family History

by Adolph, Anthony

• ISBN13: 9781554074570
• ISBN10: 1554074576
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• Publisher: Firefly Books Ltd

Summary

A thorough guide to researching your Scottish family tree.This year, Scots worldwide will celebrate the Homecoming year to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. Amidst this gaiety, many will come to Scotland to reflect on their own family's journey, personally examine Scotland's past and research their family tree.Tracing Your Scottish Family History guides the reader step by step, from "ask your family first" to finding, accessing and understanding obscure local records. Anthony Adolph shares insider tips on how best to search archives, libraries, publications, registers, censuses, tax rolls, debt records, churches, testaments and deeds, and he supplies all relevant contact information. Fortunately the Internet, digitized archives and DNA sampling have made it easier than ever to reconstruct a family tree.This book's abundant archival photographs and illustrations and Adolph's engaging text describe Scottish society in detail, from the early seanachaidh (druids) and chieftains to Viking genetics. Adolph explains how critical historical events affected how and where Scottish people lived, and he gives comprehensive detail on such important topics as naming patterns, clans and tartans, heraldry, parishes, landholders and tacksmen, the Burghs, sasines, farmers and crofters, and Highland and Lowland families.Tracing Your Scottish Family History is a comprehensive research tool and easy-to-use guide that gives an authentic historical perspective of Scotland and the lives of its people -- a core reference for researching a Scottish family tree.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Abbreviations used in the text

Getting started

How to start your family tree

Archives and organizations

Scotlands' names

Know your parish

The main records

General Registration

Censuses

Church registers

Religious denominations

Testaments, deed and other useful records

How they lived

What people did

The burghs

Landholders

Farmers and crofters

Clans and tartans

Comings and goings

Emigration

The origins of Scotland's people

Genetic evidence

Useful addresses

Index

Acknowledgments & picture credits

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction This book was written to mark the 250th anniversary in 2009 of the birth of Robert Burns, the Ploughman Poet, whose words captured the spirit of the Scottish nation. His anniversary year has been declared Scotland's Homecoming Year, which aims to encourage Scots all over the world to come back to visit, and to assure them of a warm welcome when they do.To come home you need to know where you come from. Underpinning Homecoming Year is genealogy, the study of family trees or pedigrees, and its associated discipline of family history, the study of the stories behind the pedigrees. In many countries, computerization of records has rocketed genealogy from a minority interest into an immensely popular obsession. But in Scotland, knowing your roots is nothing new. Right back in the 16th century, the French joked of any Scotsman they encountered, "that man is the cousin of the king of the Scots," for that was what he would surely claim. A rather more cynical view was penned in the mid-18th century by Charles Churchill (1731-64), in his Prophecy of Famine: "Two boys, whose birth beyond all question springs/From great and glorious, tho' forgotten kings,/Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred/On the same bleak and barren mountain's head..."Sarcastic, yes, but accurate, for many of the widespread Lowland families and Highland clans were indeed founded by scions of Scotland's ruling dynasties, be they in origin Pict, Briton, Gael, Viking or Norman. And such knowledge was not lost, especially in the Gaelic-speaking parts, when ancestors' names were remembered through the sloinneadh, the patronymic or pedigree, in which two or more - often many - generations of ancestors' names were recited, and which was a natural part of everyone's sense of identity.Such essential knowledge was threatened, diluted and sometimes lost by migration, whether to other parts of Scotland or over the seas in the white-sailed ships. Nonetheless, it results today in many people all over the world being able to point at a particular spot on the map of Scotland and say, "that is home."This book is for those who can't but want to, or who can but want to learn more. I know that many aspects of genealogy such as DNA and nonconformity can seem terribly complicated, and that some specific aspects of Scottish genealogy (such as services of heirs, wadsets and precets of clare constat) seem to have been designed purposely to intimidate the faint-hearted. And, given the great amount of contradictory information flying about, does your Scottish surname actually indicate that you belong to the clan, or may wear a tartan, or doesn't it?I hope this book will help guide you through these issues, to develop a much fuller understanding of your Scottish family history, and to find your own way back, so to speak, to your Scottish home.