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Scotland Church Records

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For information about records for non-Christian religions in Scotland, go to the Religious Records page.

Church records are an excellent source for accurate information on names, dates, and places of birth, marriage, and death. Since Civil Registration in Scotland began in 1855, they are a major source for genealogical research in Scotland before 1855.

Online Resources

Records of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland:

Scotlandspeople - 1742-1900
Scottish Catholic archive.
Catholic Church. Some Catholic Registers are held at the National Archives of Scotland with the identifier of NAS REF: RH21.

Research Tutorials at FamilySearch:

Wiki articles describing online collections are found at:

Go to the Scotland Research Strategies page.

Understanding the Records

United Presbyterian Church at Stonehouse, Scotland.jpg

Church of Scotland

The Church of Scotland (a Presbyterian church) has been the recognised national church of Scotland since 1690; it is not a state or "established" church (although that latter description has found its way into various official documentation such as marriage registers) and that independence from the state was eventually acknowledged in the Church of Scotland Act 1921. The organization of the Church of Scotland is as follows:

  • The General Assembly is the highest organizational body and serves as the final ecclesiastical court of appeals.
  • A Synod is made up of several presbyteries and serves as the court of appeals for those presbyteries.
  • A Presbytery is made up of several parishes and serves as the court of appeals for those parishes.
  • A parish is the lowest governing body.
  • A chapelry or chapel of ease is a small church which serves a distant part of a parish.

The two main types of records are Old Parochial Registers (OPR) and Kirk Session Records. OPR's list baptisms, marriages and burials. Kirk Session Records are the records of the Church Courts. They often list information relevant to genealogy.

  • Descriptions of parishes can be found at Genuki.org.uk.
  • Maps showing parish boundaries to help determine which parish records to search
  • Lists of neighboring parishes can be found at Genuki.org.uk.

Nonconformists

Churches which are not part of the Church of Scotland are often referred to as nonconformist. There were two categories of so-called nonconformist churches in Scotland:

  • Seceders -- Those who seceded from the main church but were still Presbyterian in form.
  • Dissenters -- Those who were not Presbyterian in form, such as Baptist, Methodist, or Catholic.

Nonconformists had their own congregations and kept their own records. They could go to church wherever they wished and were not confined to parish boundaries. However, before 1834, nonconformist ministers were not authorized to perform marriages as clergyman; after 1834 they could perform marriages if the banns had first been read in the parish church. Total authority was granted in 1855.In the context of Scots Law as it applied until 1939 this only in practice affected the mode of marriage as until then any declaration of marriage in front of witnesses was valid although many might have failed to be recorded.

The National Archives of Scotland maintains these types of records under the following references: CH4-CH16. A detailed description of the record types is available online at the University of Glasgow (Archive Services).

For more background information on churches in Scotland, including a historical time-line, read the article Scotland Church History.

Identifying Churches

Books containing maps that show parish boundaries:

Parish outline maps are also available online at http://www.scotlandsfamily.com/parish-maps.htm.

1851 Census of Places of Worship

Popularly called the 1851 Religious Census, this is a resource for identifying what churches existed where in 1851. Read more...

The Union List of Church Records

The staff of the Family History Library has compiled a resource called the Scotland Church Records Union List which strives to identify all pre-1855 churches in Scotland and whether they have surviving records. It also contains brief parish and congregation histories. This information, arranged by county then parish, is available through the Wiki by searching for a county or parish of interest.

Old Parochial Registers (OPR)

The term old parochial registers refers to the parish records kept by the Presbyterian Church (Church of Scotland) from the time the church began keeping records up to the year 1855. Records include registers of:

  • Births/baptisms
  • marriages/proclamations
  • deaths/burials

The amount of information in registers varies from parish to parish. Later records generally give more complete information than earlier ones. For more information see Scotland Established (Presbyterian) Church Records.

Most parish registers begin after 1650.

Kirk Session Records

Some kirk session (parish court) records begin earlier than the parish registers. Kirk session are church court records and which may have some christening, marriage, and burial records for those who belonged to a different denomination such as a Seceder (a Presbyterian church outside of the Church of Scotland) or Dissenter (Non-Parochial) church. The main Seccesionist churches included the following:

  • The Reformed Presbyterian Church
  • The Original Secession (or First Secession) Church
  • The Associate Synods (Burghers and Antiburghers, and the Auld Licht Burghers, New Licht Burghers, Auld Licht Antiburghers and New Licht Antiburghers)
  • The Relief Church
  • The United Secession Church
  • The United Presbyterian Church
  • The Free Church

Online Kirk Session Records

To view online data from some Seceder church denominations throughout many areas of Scotland, visit Oldscottish.com

Some early parish registers may be in Latin. Scotland has its own version of English, so you may need to use a dictionary to understand some words and terms. Read more in Scotland Language and Languages.

For an interesting article on what is found in the registers, see:

  • Whyte, Donald. "Old Parochial Registers of Scotland." Refers to people from various parts of Ireland - baptisms, marriages - that were held in various Scotland Old Parish Registers for the years 1691-1846. Article in The Irish Ancestor, vol.III, no.2,1971, pages 79-82. Family History Library book 941.5 B2i.

Indexes

Indexes to the old parochial registers have been created and are available in various forms.  See the following Wiki articles for more information:



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Links to Scotland-related articles


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