Nails are being bitten, teeth are slowly chattering, and nerves are growing ever more frayed, as Scots around the world patiently await the release of the 1921 Census All good things come to those who wait, but if pinning all of your hopes on breaking through a brick wall with the 1921 census, have you truly already consulted all of the additional resources currently available which might also help? In this article I will take a look at some of the key 20th century resources available, and perhaps a few that you may not be quite so familiar with.
The essential starting point
The essential starting point for the 20th century are, of course, the registers for civil registration, first established in 1855. These records of births, marriages and deaths for Scotland uniquely within the United Kingdom list the names of both parents, allowing us with relative ease to confirm that a candidate of interest is the same person within each type of record. In addition to the names of parents to a child, birth records also uniquely note the date and place of their marriage, a detail not provided in other British equivalents, which can help us to find their marriage record.
The Scottish civil registers of birth provide the parents’ date and place of marriage
The Scottish civil registers of marriage provide the name (including maiden name) of the mothers of the bride and groom
The Scottish civil registers of death provide the parents’ names, and women are indexed under both their married and maiden mames
A marriage record in turn will note the ages of the two spouses, and their own parents’ names, allowing the location of their own birth records to be found with relative ease. Death records can usually be just as easily located to complete the story, with those for women indexed under both married and maiden names.
Indexes to all 20th-century records are available online through the ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) website, and many historic images, although closure periods are in place for access to the most recent images for privacy purposes – 100 years for births, 75 years for marriages, and 50 years for deaths. More recent records can be ordered as certified copies, but all records almost to the present day are available for consultation at various centres across Scotland offering access to the same database – the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh, and regional research hubs in Hawick, Kilmarnock, Glasgow, Alloa and Inverness. Contact details for these are available at (www.scotlandspeople. gov.uk/visit-us), although at the time of writing there are currently some access restrictions in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.