The History of Statutory Registration in Scotland

[Montrose Budie]

My abject apologies if this info has already been posted, but anyone interested in the real details of this subject should have a look at http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/scotti ... handdeath/ (While I've been aware of this project for quite a few years, I can't for the life of me recall where I picked up on this new www address, - here on TS or elsewhere.)

If I picked up the address on TS then please regard this post as a review of the website !

The site is best introduced via its own introduction .....

This project, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, is a history of civil registration in Scotland from its beginning in 1855 until the Second World War. It shows how the basic tools of Scotland's 'vital statistics' - the registers of births, marriages and deaths, were produced. This site describes some of the people responsible for Scotland's vital records, the difficulties they experienced, and some of the characteristics of the Scottish registration system. Amongst other things, it looks at the problems of producing accurate death certificates, regular and 'irregular' marriages (including those at Gretna Green), divorce, compulsory smallpox vaccination, the compiling of the census, and the work of the General Register Office for Scotland in times of war. If you click on the headings on the left hand side of this page, - see below, - several of them have further sections discussing different aspects of that subject. The records of the Registrar General for Scotland, held in the National Archives of Scotland, are a magnificent source of information on the social history of Scotland, since they deal with everyday life and personal relationships. If you have Scottish ancestors, and have traced their vital records in the General Register Office for Scotland, you may find this site of interest in showing how your family records were created - and why they should not always be taken at face value!


Introduction
Leading Actors
Birth
Marriage
Death
Divorce
The Census
Health and Disease
Vaccination
War and National Registration
The Records
Detailed Research
Further Reading

The approach is very detailed, some would argue academic, even a tad esoteric, and not necessarily of interest to every family history researcher.

I've always argued, however, that a proper and full understanding of the records of interest to us can only be achieved by understanding the legislation that led to their creation, and the detailed processes that the registrars followed (or didn't, as the case might be, in terms of some registrars' less than full understanding of the legislation ! - for a registrar in a large urban registration district his experience would be wide enough so that most situations would have come up, but for a registrar in a tiny rural RD, it could be the situation that there were only a handful or less of registrations each year, thereby leading to mimimal experience of the possible situations).

OK, for 90% of records, the process is obvious, but the explanation involving the other 10% can be quite illuminating.

As an example, I've never understood why some death records were made on the basis of info provided by the Procurator Fiscal (I'm not talking about RCE entries !).

From http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/scotti ... handdeath/ I now know that the explanation is simple. For any death that did not take place at the home of the deceased, or a relative's home, the death had to be referred to the PF inside 24 hrs; so that he then provided the info to the registrar, even when there were family members in the locality.

The 'Further Reading' section referred to above is excellent, but, if you dig a wee bit further on the site, there's an 8 page bibliography, containing, for me, some old friends !, as well as some other titles that I'm looking forward to tracking down.

The material under the various headings above is often just a summary of much longer articles published, or to be published, in academic journals, fully referenced in the Further Reading section.

mb

[LesleyB]

Hi mb

What a really useful and interesting article. Good to be provided with a lot more background to the issues too - the bits that are usually skated over or missed out altogether. Lots of really colourful description there, which explains a lot...

The boards sometimes employed an elderly or incapacitated parishioner who might otherwise have needed poor relief from the parish. In these cases, the registrar's fees were a kind of unofficial pension. Getting rid of an incompetent registrar was a cumbersome process, since only the sheriff had the legal power to sack him.

....The registrars had to keep two sets of books, one for the parish, and the other for transmission to Edinburgh, and the examiners checked carefully to see that the entries were the same in each. In most cases they were satisfied, but in a few parishes they reported that the registrar was slipshod, absent, or, in extreme cases, drunk.

Best wishes
Lesley