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.

One hundred years ago, on the 4th June 1913, the suffragette Emily Davison ran in front of King George V’s horse during the Derby at Epsom Racecourse to promote the ‘Votes for Women’ cause. She died four days later of her injuries. The suffragettes in Scotland were also making themselves heard and there are a number of books in the library that provide more details on this subject. The most comprehensive history is Leah Leneman’s ‘Guid Cause: the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland’ (1995) which covers the period 1867 until after World War 1 and includes a list of Scottish women who were active suffragettes.

The movement was most prominent in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee, but there were smaller groups of suffragettes in other parts of Scotland. Examples of relevant publications include Lynn M. Brewster’s ‘Suffrage in Stirling: the struggle for women’s votes’ (2002) and Marsali Taylor’s ‘Women’s Suffrage in Shetland’ (2010).

Forcible feeding of women who were jailed was also used in Scotland. An account of this practice is given in ‘Martyrs in our Midst: Dundee, Perth and the forcible feeding of suffragettes’ by Leah Leneman (1993). This book provides detailed reports of the experiences of several women including Ethel Moorhead, Arabella Scott and Frances Gordon.

The library’s schools resource A Guid Cause might also be of interest to researchers investigating the suffragettes in Scotland, with digitised original material from the library’s collections.

Have you ever wondered what the symbols on old gravestones mean? Or why different styles of burial monuments look the way they do? The library has a number of books in its collections which provide more information on this topic. A general book, which covers graveyards over the whole of the UK, is Trevor Yorke’s ‘Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials’, Newbury, 2010, which discusses the history of burials and the different types of monument that were built.

If you want to know more about Scottish graveyards and their tombstones, then ‘Understanding Scottish Graveyards’ by Betty Willsher, Edinburgh, 2005 and ‘Researching Scottish Graveyards’ by Bruce B. Bishop, Elgin, 2010, can help further your research.

Dane Love’s ‘Scottish Kirkyards’, Stroud, 2010, provides an explanation of the role of the kirkyard within the Scottish community as well as detailing burial customs of Scotland. Hamish Brown’s ‘A Scottish Graveyard Miscellany: Exploring the Folk Art of Scotland’s Gravestones’, Edinburgh, 2008, discusses examples of graveyard art from all over Scotland.

The National Library of Scotland has just released digital copies of British military lists from the First and Second World Wars. They list all the officers who served in the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force from 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. They can be viewed for free on the library website.

There are two new additions to our Digital Gallery, both of which are free to use. The first is the ‘Biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen’, published in three volumes in 1875. The books contain biographies and engraved portraits of Scots men (and some women) mainly during the 16th to 19th centuries. The biographies discuss individuals who were prominent in the fields of medicine, religion, art and literature, politics, philosophy and the natural sciences.

The second is a collection of 20 volumes of  ‘Gazetteers of Scotland, 1803-1901′. These provide a comprehensive geographical encyclopedia of Scotland during in the 19th century. They include information on parishes, towns and counties in Scotland, as well as historical and geographical details on each location.

The fire service has an illustrious history in Scotland. The library has a number of books in its collections which provide detailed histories of various brigades. These include: ‘150 years of firefighting in Tayside, 1835-1985′, Liverpool, 1985; ‘The History of the Lothian & Borders Fire Brigade’, Edinburgh, 1985; and ‘Ready, aye ready: Dundee Fire Brigade, 1835-1939′, Glasgow, 1939.

Alexander Reid has written ‘Aye ready! the history of Edinburgh Fire Brigade, the oldest municipal brigade in Britain’, Edinburgh, 1974, while Alan Forbes has more recently published ‘Everyday Heroes: the 30 year story of Strathclyde Fire Brigade’, Edinburgh, 2005.

If you are interested in the Scottish Fire Services training facility in Gullane, East Lothian then Beryl Robinson’s ‘From Golfers to Firefighters…where hope is unbroken: the story of Gullane’s Marine Hotel transformed to the Scottish Fire Services College’, Gullane, 2005, may provide further information. If you want to find out more about the creator of the British Fire Service then the book to read is Brian Henham’s ‘True Hero: the life and times of James Braidwood, father of the British Fire Service’, Romford, 2000.

Finally, the amusingly named ‘Scooshers’ by Andrew F Anderson, Gloucester, 1993, tells the story of Glasgow Fire Service.

If you are researching the police in Scotland then you may be interested in the following titles in the library collections. Lothian and Borders is covered in ‘A History of the Lothian and Borders Police’ by Tom W Archibald, 1990, while if your interest is further north, ‘The History of the Perthshire & Kinross-shire Constabularies’ by Willie MacFarlane, 2010 may help with your research.

If you have some old police badges or other items of memorabilia, you may be able to find out more about them from ‘Scottish Insignia as used by old Police Forces’, by John C Green, 2008. This book provides a brief history of the old Scottish police forces and lists and photographs of identifiable items associated with them.

If you have an ancestor who was in the Edinburgh police in the early nineteenth century, then ‘The Edinburgh Police Register 1815-1859′, edited by Peter Ruthven-Murray, 1991, may provide more details. It includes information such as warrant numbers, date of joining, age at joining, height, facial characteristics, marital status, trade or occupation before joining and reason for leaving, amongst other details.

Draughtsmen hard at work in 1895

The NLS holds the archive of James Bartholomew and Sons, engravers and mapmakers. As well as being a fascinating source of information about maps and mapmaking, the archive contains extensive staff records which will prove very useful to family historians. Covering the period from the 1880s to the 1970s it contains wage books and cards, in-house magazines and a collection of photographs of staff and social events. The one here shows the firm’s draughtsmen in the 1890s.

You can take a look at items from the archive in our Maps Reading Room at Causewayside – or if you can’t visit in person, you can take advantage of our remote enquiry service to ask about particular staff members.

There is also an exhibition about the archive currently running in George IV Bridge, which is well worth a visit.

1638 National Covenant

During the seventeenth century, the Scottish Covenanters were fighting for their religious freedoms against the King in London. Many were martyred for their cause and monuments to those who died can be found in many areas of Scotland. There are a number of recent books in the library which provide more information on the subject. These include Ronald Ireland’s ‘The Bloody Covenant: Crown and Kirk in Conflict’ (2010), ‘The Covenanters’ by Claire Watts (2011) and the incredibly detailed ‘Covenanter Encyclopaedia’ by Dane Love (2009).

For those looking for specific Covenanting ancestors, the ‘Scottish Covenanter Genealogical Index’ by Isabelle McCall MacLean (2007) may be of interest. There is also the ‘Register of the Rev. John MacMillan: Being a Record of Marriages and Baptisms Solemnised by him among the Cameronian Societies’, edited by Rev. Henry Paton (1908). This latter title is a record of the marriages and baptisms of Covenanters during the period 1706-1751.

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.