MP for Caithness. In 1790, desiring ‘to elucidate the Natural History and Political State of Scotland’, he sent a detailed questionnaire to each parish minister, asking about geography, climate, natural resources and social customs. He received all manner of different answers, including a lot of idiosyncratic notes, and published the lot.
The New or Second Statistical Account was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1832. It included maps of the counties and took evidence from schoolmasters and doctors as well as ministers. It was published in volumes between 1834 and 1845. For Assynt, Sutherland, for example, we learn ‘There is no register of date previous to 1798. Since that period, births and marriages have been recorded with tolerable regularity, but there is no register of deaths’, and the population was 1800 in 1760, 2419 in 1801, and 3161 in 1831, divided into 375 families, and 1400 of the population was attached to the church and parish of ‘Store’ (Stoer).
A Third Statistical Account was created between 1951 and 1992 and can be inspected in libraries. A Fourth Statistical Account of East Lothian is on its way.
Volume 20 of the Old Statistical Account has a ‘List of Parishes suppressed, annexed to other parishes, or which have changed their names, with a corresponding List of the Parishes under which they are now included’.
Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754-1835), who initiated the First Statistical Account of Scotland.
Groome and Lewis
Francis H. Groome’s Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland was compiled between 1882 and 1885. It is always worth checking since it states which presbytery and synod assemblies covered each parish, and will help you sort out places with the same name. It is online at www.visionofbritain.org and at the Gazetteer for Scotland, www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/gaztitle.html.
Samuel Lewis’s A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland (1846) is online at www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=308.
Obscure place names
These can present a problem if their location is not clear from the records. If even a ‘Google’ search yields nothing, try the place name indexes in the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland (1306-1659); the sasine abridgements, or documents of land grants, (1781-1830), or enquire at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, which has records down to the level of individual field names. The GROS Index of Scottish Place Names is helpful, as is L.R. Timperley’s A Directory of Landownership in Scotland c.1770 (SRS, 1976).
Useful websites
www.genuki.org.uk (Genuki) is a free website for United Kingdom genealogy. Its Scottish section (www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/) can be searched by topic or by county. It presents a map of the pre-1890s counties and, by clicking on the county name, you will be given a brief description, a list of parishes, links to the county’s Family History Society, archives and libraries, notes on special resources, and links to relevant sections of GenWeb, a worldwide network of genealogists.
www.ambaile.org.uk. The Highland Council Archive Service’s resources website (for the Highlands) containing old pictures, postcards, newspaper articles, personal family photographs and items of oral history.
www.scotlandgenweb.org is the homepage of the Scotland GenWeb project. This volunteer-run service provides county-by-county pages of links to sites concerning families, places and topics, and is well worth exploring.
Maps
These are splendid ways of looking down on your ancestors’ world, to see what the terrain was like, what roads, rivers and railways there were, what other parishes were nearby – and perhaps even spot their actual houses.
All local archives and histories will help here. Reference books often say you will sometimes find detailed local maps in estate records, records of railway and canal companies, and processes of the Court of Session (as detailed in Descriptive List of Plans in the Scottish Record Office) – but few people have time to search these, and many already appear in local history books. But do look at the National Library of Scotland’s map collection, in Edinburgh, or at its fabulous site, www.nls.uk/maps/index.html. This includes the earliest surviving detailed maps of Scotland, by Timothy Pont, made about 1583-96, which come with textual descriptions
A map from the surveyor’s report to the Crown Commissioners on the lands of Strowan (Struan, Perthshire), one of the estates annexed or forfeited to the Crown after the 1745 rebellion.
Other sites
www.maps.google.co.uk/maps for modern maps.
www.landmap.ac.uk/gallery/imagepages/pages/landmap_dem_250m_scotland_jpg.htm. A relief map of Scotland.
www.rcahms.gov.uk. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland’s site (incorporating the National Monuments Record of Scotland), with maps and other details of ancient monuments and old buildings.
of places (see www.nls.uk/pont/generalnew.html). Of the island of Raasay, for example, Pont wrote:
‘Raasa ane Ile neer the Skye upon 4 myle long perteyning to Mac-Gillichallum Rasa of the hous of Lewis of old, now holds this Ile of the Earle Seafort, it hath ane paroch kirk Kilmaluag, one castell called Breokill. hard by is Rona, a smal Ile, pertyning to that gentleman also.’
You can study the subject of old maps in A Guide to the Early Maps of Scotland to 1850 (Scottish Royal Geographical Society, 1973).
The Pont maps were saved from almost certain oblivion by Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, Fife (c.1590s-1657), Lord Lyon King of Arms, whose third wife Margaret Arnot of Ferny was a distant cousin of mine. He assembled an important collection of old manuscripts on Scottish history, which is now in the NLS.
The Pont map showing Lochs Awe and Fyne, Co. Argyll.
The Ordnance Survey
One of the finest graphic sources for your family history, often showing your family’s actual homes, are Ordnance Survey maps. Many, both current and historical (dating back over the last two hundred years), are found at local archives.
The Survey was sparked by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion, known as the ‘45, when King George II’s generals realized they had no serviceable maps of the realm (those that existed stopped at county boundaries, so were useless for military purposes). Between 1747 and 1755 William Roy of the Royal Engineers organized a survey of Scotland, and in 1791 the creation of accurate topographical maps of all Britain began. The Trigonometrical Survey, renamed the Ordnance Survey, created maps to different scales; the most detailed (such as the 1:25,000 Explorer series) will show the
