In Family Tree’s February 2022 issue I discussed many types of records that can be used for land research in Scotland. These included resources available online, such as directories, gazetteers and maps, as well as others found only within archives, most notably the all-important sasines registers (pronounced ‘sayzins’!). If you have an interest in a specific property, perhaps for a house history or a oneplace study, there are many additional resources available which can further assist your research.
The history of occupants
A building’s history will of course tie in with the history of its occupation. In the civil records of births, marriages and deaths, as recorded from 1855, and available on ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), we can identify key life events that occurred at a particular property, or which may identify where a person may have lived at a specific point if not at the place where the relevant event happened (e.g. if at a hospital or poorhouse). These records, however, cannot tell us anything about the properties themselves, and unfortunately cannot be searched by a particular address to look for occupants across time. Records such as directories, available in libraries and online at https://archive.org/details/scottishdirectories, and electoral records, similarly available in libraries (with some also online), can also help to provide names of inhabitants on an annual basis.
View of part of the Old Town, Edinburgh, 1829
What can the census tell us? 1841-1911
The decennial censuses, as recorded every ten years from 1841, can be used similarly, but these can also add further information about the properties concerned. In addition to the specific boundary information given as part of the enumeration data (registration and enumeration districts, parishes, islands, etc), records from 1861 onwards also asked a question of the head of household about the the numbers of rooms available with one or more windows. Although only a minor scrap of information, this can nevertheless provide an indication about the size of the holding occupied, and the economic status of the inhabitants. In some cases you may find several households within a single building, particularly in the case of large city based tenements, and so you will need to take into account all of these to gain an idea about the potential size and nature of a property. This detail on the number of windows can only be accessed on images via ScotlandsPeople, or via microfilm copies held in libraries across the country, as it is not recorded on any of the subscription based genealogy platforms offering partial census transcripts for Scotland, such as Ancestry (Ancestry.co.uk), FindmyPast (Findmypast.co.uk) and MyHeritage (Myheritage.com).
Use trade directories, studying the street indexes, to compare, year from year, changes, such as the inclusion of the names of newly built roads etc. Stirling, 1882: https://archive. org/details/ stirlingdirector 188182dir/ page/44/ mode/2up
Additional notes
In certain circumstances you may even find some additional information on the original census image itself, which may not be found in the transcribed versions. The 1881 census entry for 59 year old fisherman James Fraser, for example (see page 12), notes his residence at 8 Bank Row in Wick. After recording the detail of others on Bank Street on the same page, the enumerator, turning the page around ninety degrees, then wrote along the column asking for the ‘Road, Street and No. or Name of House’ the following: “...the 10 Families (157 to 167) reside in One House that has been subdivided and that has but one outside Entrance with none of the Dwellings opening directly”. This is not found on the transcribed database versions of the same record. Where these platforms do excel, however, is in offering the option to search for a particular address to see who was there every ten years, an option which ScotlandsPeople only offers on its free-to-access 1881 census transcriptions database, as originally created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.