Family and local history

Guest post by Trevor Thomson, Enquiries Assistant, Reference Services.

Part of the National Library of Scotland’s remit is to collect material about Scotland, by Scots or of interest to the people of Scotland by collection development and canny use of the legal deposit privilege.

From the perspective of genealogists with in an interest in Scotland, the National Library’s activities have created a vast and diverse collection of material some rare, even unique, and others more mundane but nevertheless enlightening.

One seemingly commonplace part of the collection is indexes of censuses, usually compiled and published by family history societies focussing on particular families or locations. These dedicated groups have trawled through the National Records of Scotland documents and listed all the available census details for the parishes of interest to them, usually for the years 1841, 1851 and 1861.

An example of such painstaking effort appears in the publications of Graham Maxwell Ancestry, who have recorded the information found in the first three national censuses for all the counties and parishes in the south east of Scotland. These are available to view free of charge in the Reading Rooms of the National Library and represent a useful enhancement to the records available at ScotlandsPeople. The records can be found on the library catalogue by doing an Author search for Graham Maxwell Ancestry.

But this is only a very small quantity of the material kept by the Library. The catalogue is always worth checking for a parish or village, no matter how apparently obscure, for books, pamphlets and maps that can enrich your understanding of your family’s past.

For those that have ancestors from Orkney and Shetland, the following books may be of help with your research. ‘Trace Your Orkney Ancestors’: A Guide to Sources for Orcadian Family and Local History’ by James M Irvine, 2004, is a comprehensive resource that covers a wide variety of records. These include church, court and estate records and a number of census subsitutes, to name a few.

For Shetland two useful booklets are Alan M Beattie’s ‘Shetland: Pre-1855 Parish Sources (Revised) for Family Historians’, 1998 and Alexander Sandison’s ‘Tracing Ancestors in Shetland’, 1985. Although not as wide-ranging as the Orkney publication, they are still a useful starting point for those interested in Shetland genealogy.

Three men in working clothes around 1870

If you’re interested in family history then we run a monthly Readers’ Workshop’ called ‘Discovering family history’, where you can find out about the resources we hold to help you with your family research. These include directories, gravestone inscriptions, newspapers and census records, to name just a few of the categories covered in the workshop which are useful for family history research.

The workshop also includes some practical information on using the Library for those that are new to our services. It’s run at a different time each month and you can find out more information, including booking details, at Readers’ Workshops.

Do come along, the workshops are open to everyone and they’re free!