TST: Church Records information for Melrose and places above it in the hierarchy

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Church Records information for Melrose and places above it in the hierarchy

Melrose

The parish church (Church of Scotland) has registers dating from 1642. Old Parish Registers (before 1855) are held in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, and copies on microfilm may be consulted in local libraries and in LDS Family History Centres around the world. Later parish registers (after 1855) are often held in the National Records of Scotland as are any records of non-conformist churches in the area (often unfilmed and unindexed, and only available there).

A transcribed version of some of the parish records was published at Edinburgh in 1913 by the Scottish Record Society. Edited by Charles S. Romanes, and entitled Melrose parish registers of baptisms, marriages, proclamations of marriages, session minutes (1723-1741) and mortuary rolls: 1642-1820, it contains baptisms, marriages and burial records, together with a useful index of names for easy access, including names of mothers of children, baptism witnesses, cautioners etc. This out of copyright book has been scanned and put online by the Internet Archive.

In his entry for the Statistical Account of Scotland (compiled 1790s, see the Statistics section of the Roxburghshire page for more details) the Rev. George Thomson made the following comment about deficiencies in the parish registers of Melrose in the late 18th century:

"A statement might be given of births, marriages, and burials, from our parish-register, but it is very incomplete; because the Seceders, considering this as an appendage to the Established Church, rather than an institution calculated to promote the civil interest of their posterity, do not in general registrate the names of their children; and, because the temptation to neglect this among the lower classes of people, has also been increased by the late tax upon registration."

For an account of the Melrose kirk session minutes, see Melrose: Its Kirk and People, 1608-1810 by John Gilbert, published by Melrose Historical Association. The kirk session records for Melrose are held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, reference CH2/386.

An article about incidents recorded in the Melrose Session Minutes of 1723-1741 was published in the June 1992 edition of the Borders Family History Society's magazine, written by Bob Fife.

Roxburghshire

For information on registers (baptisms, marriages and burials) for a particular parish, please see that parish's page. General advice on parish registers throughout Scotland can be found under Church Records on the main Scotland page in GENUKI.

The website of the National Records of Scotland includes a leaflet on irregular marriages and information on the known surviving registers. Irregular marriages occurred along the Border and were a form of marriage by consent, convenient both for English runaway couples and Scottish Borderers who did not want to marry in their own churches. The Church of Scotland disapproved of such marriages and would often catch up with a couple, perhaps when their first child was born or baptized. So kirk session minutes can be another useful source for tracing irregular marriages.

Graham and Emma Maxwell are transcribing and indexing baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in Scottish Borders kirk session records and non-conformist church records. Their website also offers a free search facility for these resources.

The kirk session of a parish consists of the minister of the parish and the elders of the congregation. It looks after the general wellbeing of the congregation and, particularly in centuries past, parochial discipline. Most kirk session records are held in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh and can be fascinating reading. For more information see Anne Gordon's Candie for the Foundling published by the Pentland Press in 1992. ISBN 1 872795 75 7 (720 pages).

For an account of the Border kirk session records, focusing particularly on poor relief and the dispensation of discipline, see M.C. Lawson's article "The Poor, Crime and Punishment, and the Power of the Kirk in the Borders, 17th & 18th Centuries" which was published on pages 14-15 of the June 1996 Borders Family History Society magazine.

Scotland

Scotland - Church Records - links and information.

Ecclegen is a website which deals with ecclesiastical genealogy. It contains the whole of the text of Ewing’s Annals of the Free Church of Scotland, 1843-1900, along with supplementary material on a good number of the ministers. It also has a digital General Index of Scottish Presbyterian ministers. This contains the names of all the ministers listed in the Hew Scott’s Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (Vols.1-8), Ewing’s Annals, David Scott’s Annals of the Original Secession Church; Small’s History of the Congregations of the United Presbyterian Church (Vols.1 and 2); and other lesser reference works. It is, I think, easy to search and a click will then take you to the appropriate page of these reference works. Only online material is listed in the Index and a link is provided in each case. This makes searching these works much easier.

Certificate of Proclamation

Church Records in Scotland

Registers of the Church of Scotland prior to 1855 are held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh (see also the GRO tutorial). Copies can also be seen at LDS family history centres around the world.
Church of Scotland records after that date, as well as records of a number of non-conformist churches (e.g. Catholic, Episcopalian, Free Church) are usually held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. Baptisms and marriages in the Church of Scotland parish registers before 1855 have been indexed and these indexes may be consulted at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, in LDS family history centres around the world, and also online through ScotlandsPeople, which also provides digitised images of records (for a fee).
Old Parish Registers of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1553-1854 can be consulted as digital images, either by visiting the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh or through the pay-per-view website ScotlandsPeople.
List of the Old Parochial Registers. This list is based on the printed Detailed List of the Old Parochial Registers of Scotland which was first published in 1872. It provides a basic reference guide for identifying the dates for the births/baptisms, marriages/proclamations of marriage and deaths/burials in the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) held by the National Records of Scotland. Three appendices are also provided which list: (1) Church of Scotland records in the National Records of Scotland (formerly the Scottish Record Office and the National Archives of Scotland) containing pre-1855 birth, death and marriage entries. (2) Kirk session and other material found in the OPRs. (3) Miscellaneous records containing entries from Non-Conformist churches relevant to the OPRs. For a printed guide to the above see The Parishes, Registers & Registrars of Scotland edited by S.M. Spiers and published by the Scottish Association of Family History Societies. This also contains parish maps for each county and a list of addresses for local Register Offices (see also the Civil Registration section).
See the Excerpt from Jock Tamson's bairns: a history of the records of the General Register Office for Scotland by Cecil Sinclair Edinburgh, 2000, provided by the National Records of Scotland.
The Kirk Session of a parish consists of the minister of the parish and the elders of the congregation. It looks after the general wellbeing of the congregation and, particularly in centuries past, parochial discipline. Most Kirk Session records are held in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh and can be fascinating. For more information on this see Anne Gordon's Candie for the Foundling published by the Pentland Press in 1992. ISBN 1 872795 75 7 (720 pages).
Church Court Records Online In partnership with several local authority and university archives in Scotland, National Records of Scotland (NRS) look after the records of Scotland's presbyterian church courts. The records consist of the minutes and accounts of kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. They also contain a wide variety of other documents.
To assist in the identification of the different entities that have existed during the turbulent history of the Church of Scotland, there is a diagram and set of notes, based on those originally compiled by Linda Merle, which may be of assistance.
Quaker Records in Scotland.
Notes on Quaker ancestors in Scotland provided by the Quaker FHS.
Scottish Catholic Archives at Columba House, Edinburgh holds some church records and has information about others. Most dioceses have deposited their historical records at Columba House, and retain only current records. Much material from Scots Catholic Colleges overseas is at Columba House. The Archdiocese of Glasgow and the Diocese of Paisley retain their historic records. At Columba House are Status Animarum from the early 19th Century (e.g. Glasgow 1808) - lists of all Catholics and in some counties (mainly in North East Scotland, e.g. Morayshire) lists of everyone. The National Records of Scotland has photocopies of all pre-1855 Roman Catholic parish registers.
The LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) have now provided online search facilities for the IGI (International Genealogical Index). Hugh Wallis has provided a search facility which greatly simplifies searching by batch number. See also Finding LDS Batch Numbers. Note that on September 1, 2017, FamilySearch discontinued its microfilm distribution services.
Scottish Jewish Archive Centre is centralising Jewish records, building databases, and recording burials in Jewish cemeteries (or sections of cemeteries). Numbers of records are quite small.
Methodist records are in a number of archives. Generally records of rural churches went to university archives, records of city churches went to local authority archives.
Episcopal Church records also are in a variety of archives. It is best to search at the National Register of Archives to locate them. Some are at the National Records of Scotland.
After 1753, when English law forbad irregular marriages, a number of people who objected to marrying in a church wed in border centres where the couple's own consent to marriage before witnesses was legal under Scottish Law. Gretna is the most famous of these. Marriages were conducted by self appointed ministers at the border Toll booths along the few roads into Scotland.
Irregular Border and Scottish Runaway Marriages are addressed on the National Records of Scotland website.

UK and Ireland

UK & Ireland - Church Records - links and information.

Finding L.D.S. Batch Numbers

Batch numbers are used to identify the sources of records included on the I.G.I. (International Genealogical Index). Now that the L.D.S. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) have provided online search facilities to this unparalleled resource, but without as yet providing means of limiting name searches to particular localities, batch numbers have become a valuable search aid because they can be used on the >Custom Search page to restrict searches to a particular parish. Unfortunately the L.D.S. have not provided an online index to batch numbers, and unofficial listings, while useful, are very far from complete and are not completely accurate. However, by following the steps below, it is possible to use the existing L.D.S. place search facility to determine batch numbers yourself:-

Please note: batch numbers for entries extracted from Scottish Civil Registration records (1855-1875) do not appear to be available online.

1	Go to the L.D.S. Place Search page.	You can also reach this page from the initial search page at http://www.familysearch.org - just select the "Custom" tab, then the "Family History Catalogue" link, and finally select "Place Search".
2	Enter the name of the parish or place in the Place Textbox and press the Search Button (or hit "Enter" on your keyboard").	You can limit the place search to a county or country by completing the optional "Part of" text box , but it is much safer to leave this blank and select from the resulting matches (step 3).
3	Select the appropriate location from the displayed list of place-name matches.	A "No Match" does not necessarily mean that the place or parish you are seeking is not included on the I.G.I. The indexes are apparently listed under "old" parish names only, and there are many places (e.g. villages and hamlets, which are not parishes and there are many parishes which are too modern to be included. In both cases indexes for your place/parish may well be included as a "title" within an "old" parish entry. For "places" you need to find which "old" parish included that place, and for modern parishes you need to identify its "mother parish". (Many GENUKI county pages now include gazetteers and/or church/parish indexes which may help identify the appropriate parish name to use.)
4	Select "... - Church Records -Indexes" from the list of available topics.	If this topic does not appear then unfortunately the parish is not included on the I.G.I. Please Note - the topic must be "Church Records - Indexes", NOT "Church Records".
5	Select the appropriate "Computer Printout" from the list of displayed titles.	The list of displayed titles may include non-conformist churches located within the parish and also "daughter" parishes of the parish you originally specified. Where no denomination is given, the church may be assumed to belong to the Church of England/Church of Scotland. The term "Computer Printout" seems rather inappropriate as it does not refer to a hard-copy, but to a set of electronic records in the L.D.S. database.
6	Note the Batch Numbers (in the first row of the "Notes" section).	If the term "Batch Number" does not appear, the selected records are not included on the I.G.I.
7	Produce a series of six digit numbers by combining each five digit number with each of the digits which follow the hyphen.	For example, 15565-1,2 would give you 155651 and 155652.
8	Where prefix letter(s) is/are specified, prefix each 6-digit number with those letters. The resulting "letter + 6-digit" strings are the batch numbers for the desired records. Otherwise, if no prefix is given, prefix each 6-digit number with M or E (for marriages), or P, C, I or J (for christenings). The resulting strings are potential batch numbers for the records in question and one or more of them will be valid.	In cases where the prefix is not specified, this step can only be a matter of trial and error - prefixes C, P and M are the most common prefixes and should be tried first, but E, I and J do occur quite regularly. Putative batch numbers can often be verified by making test searches using a very common surname. (Other prefix letters do exist but these relate to material submitted by L.D.S. members rather than to records resulting from the Church's record extraction programme.)

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UK and Ireland: Church Records

General

Find a Church - a Directory of Christian Churches in the UK and Ireland, providing basic location and contact information, details of services, etc.
Free searches of parish and nonconformist registers are provided by FreeReg.
FamilySearch's page on IGI Batch Numbers for the British Isles and North America
Hugh Wallis provides a batch number search facility, which greatly simplifies the task of searching the I.G.I. for records from particular churches (useful, for example, in case of strangely-spelled names). A further batch number site is provided by Archer Software.
The LDS also supply additional church baptism and marriage records on their British Vital Records Index (2nd Edition) CD. A breakdown of the number of records included on the BVRI from each county and parish is provided on the Genoots website.(archived copy)
Glossary of terms related to church records, by Martyn Parsons.
The Official Non-Parochial BMD Records Service - a free index search facility for various unpublished registries from 1534 to 1865, from National Archives Refrences RG4 and RG5, with a pay-per-view access to the original records.
The National Archives provides a Research Guide on Nonconformists - advice on TNA's holdings

Lyon-Turner, G. Original Records of Early Nonconformity Under Persecution and Indulgence - 3 vols. T. Fisher Unwin, London (1911) [Online copies: Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3]

Anglican

Two major marriage licence indexing projects: the Faculty Office Marriage Licence Index (of licences issued by the Master of Faculties of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the period 1714 to 1850), and the Vicar-General Marriage Licence Index (of licences issued by the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the period 1701 to 1850 undertaken by the SoG are now on www.findmypast.co.uk.

Free searches of parish registers are provided by FamilySearch.
Commercial register search sites include Ancestry, TheGenealogist, and www.findmypast.co.uk.
An article on clandestine marriages - by Jennifer M. Payne.

M.W. Foster. "A Comedy of Errors" or "The Marriage Records of England and Wales, 1837-1899", 19 Khouri Avenue, Wellington 6005, New Zealand, (1998) 223 p. [ISBN 0 473 05581 3]

Baptist

The Baptist Historical Society - general information.
The Catholic Archive Society website provides information about the Society and a full Catalogue of its publications.
The Catholic Central Library has moved to Durham University library.
Catholic Heritage - website of a project to provide a centralised access point to an online collection of Archive and Library catalogues within the Catholic Church

Breed, Geoffrey. My Ancestors were Baptists (4th ed.). Society of Genealogists (2002) 135 pp. [ISBN: 1903462525]
[". . . a history of the church plus valuable information on what records can be obtained. A complete listing of all Baptist churches and dates by county and appendices showing for instance the important collection in Dr Williams Library.."]

Congregationalists

Surnam Index Online - a biographical index to the names of 32,000 Congregational Ministers from the mid-seventeenth century to 1972, with "where known, their dates, details of their education, ministries or other employment", provided by the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English.

Clifford, David J.H. My ancestors were Congregationalists in England and Wales: how can I find out more about them?, Society of Genealogists (1997) 77 pp. [ISBN: 0946789460]
["Following a useful introduction this book comprises a location list by county of Independent and Congregationalist registers to 1850. Many exist outside the Public Record Office. Details of chapels where no registers have been located are also included."]

Huguenot

Randolph Vigne. Huguenot Family Research Made Easier, Genealogist's Magazine 27, 10 (June 2003) pp. 447-449.

Inghamites

Oates, P.J. My Ancestors Were Inghamites, Society of Genealogists (2003) 149 pp. [ISBN 1 903462 77 0]
["Includes a brief history of the Inghamites, sections on chapels and their records, index of people referred to in the conference books of the Inghamites Societies, various baptism and lists of members."]

Jewish

Joseph, Austen. My Ancestors were Jewish (3rd ed.), Society of Genealogists (2002) 60 pp. [ISBN: 1903462630]
["Covers the emancipation of Jews in Europe, marriage, death and burials, census, secular records, surname information, information on repositories, internet and more."]

Methodist

The Methodist Archives and Research Centre is located at John Rylands University Library of Manchester, and provides the page Researching Methodist History.
Information about Wesleyan Methodist ministers 1847-9 supplied by Bob Bester.

Leary, William. My Ancestors were Methodists (3rd ed.), Society of Genealogists (1997) 116 pp. [ISBN: 1859514030]
["The main text [of this 3rd edition] has not changed but the appendixes detailing holdings in the SoG have been revised and updated thoroughly. The book explains the records of Methodism and what to expect from these records."]

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Church Records information for Melrose and places above it in the hierarchy

Melrose

Roxburghshire

Scotland

UK and Ireland

Church

Records

General

Anglican

Baptist

Congregationalists

Huguenot

Inghamites

Jewish

Methodist