My life inside ScotlandsPeople Centres

 Readers will not be surprised that I would want to visit these centres. Here, for the cost of £15 a day you can search and see all certificates since 1855, and censuses from 1841 to 1921, and then transcribe them - though absolutely no photographing or downloading. The cost for me in Australia is $2-3 per certificate to download, and these are restricted to ‘historic ones’, those before 1925 for births, 1950 for marriages and 1975 for deaths. In a Centre I can see certificates from 2024!

My Buchan study has over 2,500 descendants of George and Jean Buchan, with perhaps 70-80% generating a certificate in Scotland. This is due to bigger family sizes in the 1700-1900s. Emigration kicked off only in 1852 when our x3 great grandfather, Robert Buchan, sailed to Melbourne. My goal was to transcribe all the death certificates for our family that exist on ScotlandsPeople. Then I would do births for the recent decades, and marriages where it was warranted to check identity or a particular detail.

This is what obsessions are all about.

I took an A4 and an A5 notebook from Australia, and both are now full. I then bought a lovely notebook at Waverley station and two books. It’s all weight coming home though.

My strategy is to find the death record which gives you a name, spouses, occupation, parents names and occupations, cause of death - a special interest for me - and importantly the informant and how they knew the deceased. In later years they also give the full date of birth. So if you are lucky you can get away without either birth or marriage certificates. If you need to though, you can find those records more easily with some extra information.

This is so important with common names. The Johnsons, Smiths, Dicksons and Andersons. Everyone seems to be a James, Robert, Alexander or Andrew or George - all our names of course. Buchan is not so awful really in the great scheme of things. In the Highlands it’s the McDonalds, Frasers, McIntoshes, McRaes and Camerons and Macleods. Back before 1855 there is just not enough detail on the church records to be certain which Margaret Chisholm is yours.

As you know Hawick is a small 4-person Centre which is an active Archive, manned by two archivists, one of whom is a genealogist as well. People came in and out about boxes of documents. I was there on four days. Once a woman came in with a ring she’d brought up when ploughing which had initials and characteristic features, which I did not catch the details of because I was busy doing my thing. The genealogist and her were looking at records mid 1600s, also based on coins she’d dug up. Trying to match the initials to the likely social station of the ring owner. I think working in that archive would be pretty interesting.

Hawick heritage hub

The ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh had over 35 desks, with three sometimes disinterested young ‘employees’. They generally made you feel unwelcome unlike the people at Hawick. See my adventures behind the black curtain. The Hawick staff thanked me several times, and then the woman gave me a hug for being such a sport. 

The main problem I had in Edinburgh was that I kept losing internet connection to my Ancestry tree. The unhelpful young things just shrugged and said yes that happens. On the last day I was there I learned that the problem was not using the iPad consistently, and then it dropped off the internet. So I learned to just move back and forth from one person’s profile to another one, and no drop out. Why does everything take so long to sort out?

I had a favorite toilet cubicle in Edinburgh. There were only two and the one I used was never occupied. So it became mine. While talking about toilets, it was common to find a combined water and individual hand drying facility, like a tap with 30cm wings. But the best has been a three-in-one, where soap, water and drying facilities all come from a small niche in the wall. This was in Galashiels Train Station. I have also had to pay 50 pence, via my card, on one occasion.

Early impressions of mortality

By far the most common cause of death is bronchopneumonia, that hacking phlemmy chest painy fever, that can kill you in a day or a month. It can start out with any illness or accident, and then when you are weakened it can take hold, and take you out. From babies to the very aged.

It was not uncommon for families to lose their first born child to either prematurely or to an early infection or congenital problem. The Scottish doctors made a good attempt to describe the actual condition, but sometimes they were obviously guessing - cerebral sinus thrombosis? Well before CT scanning?

I noted the trend for large families, over 8 children, to march orderly toward 1 or 2 by the 2000s. Families with children every year had a high infant mortality rate. I recall two families where the majority did not survive to their sixth birthday. One was in Glasgow, and their father a baker so I hope food was not the issue. The other was in Dunfermline, where even the one who survived the longest died aged 23 of an infectious disease.

The mid-late 1900s saw a lot of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Increasingly it has become cancers, at quite advanced ages, all helped by a little sepsis or pneumonia. Occasionally a cancer death occurs below the age of 40. Thank goodness for Scottish doctors, who being a scholarly lot, are excellent at providing a diagnosis. If only a doctor had seen Catherine Matheson before she died in Inverness; she might still have died of “general derangement of the system” but we’d know what sort it was!