Sources: The Places Where They Lived

[Lesley Robertson]

Now that you’ve found some ancestors, you should also have discovered where they were living, at least at the time that record was made. Do not underestimate the distances that people moved (after all, some of them ended up in the New World!). The move might have been work-related - for example, unless they found a very good farm with a farmer they got on with, ag. labs.could move every year. Ministers went where they were sent, schoolmasters went where they could find work, and the servants from the Big House travelled with their employers.

One of the best places to go to find out what’s available about a given area is GENUKI. The information is divided among the countries of the UK&I, and then among the counties. Depending on whether or not someone is currently caring for a county, the amount of information available varies, but there’s always descriptions, lists of parishes, etc. Among the best is Berwickshire, where Viv Dunstan has created a gazetteer showing the locations of individual farms and settlements. There’s also more general inforation including contact information for the assorted archives and Family History Societies.

The National Library of Scotland has put a great deal of its map collection on line for free download here . Mapping techniques have changed over the years, and some maps are more accurate than others, but they’re all informative and because of the time-span covered, you can see how places developed.

One of my favourite sources of information about places is the Statistical Account of Scotland (SA). There are three editions, two of which are available on a site belonging to Edinburgh University If you plan to use it a lot, it woud be worth becoming a subscriber, but for odd look ups you can read the text on the screen (but not print, etc). Click on the map. This brings up another map where you can select a county. This leads to a map of the county and a list of available parishes. Click on a parish name and you get an old map of the parish and a list of the reports.The third (20th century) edition is still in copyright, but fairly easily found in 2nd hand bookshops.
In the late 18th century, Sir John Sinclair sent out lists of questions to every Parish Minister in Scotland. As the answers came back, he published them whenever he had enough to make up a volume. This was the first SA. The chapters are fascinating, although you do often have to wade through pages on the local geology, history or wildlife, depending on the interest of the Minister. They discuss everything from local employment and housing to the character of the people. In the middle of the 19th century, the exercise was repeated, and the results form the 2nd SA. Most of the first and second series can now be downloaded from the Internet Archive, although the quality of the scans can sometimes be poor.

SCRAN belongs to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments in Scotland. It contains over 360,000 photographic images from all over Scotland. Searching and viewing of small images is free.
Other images can be found on individual sites such as the Virtual Mitchell Glasgow collection..
Searching Google Images also produces surprising results.

Gazetteers and directories provide a text snapshot of a given location.
Edinburgh University has a modern Gazetteer of Scotland here. There are several commercial sites offering Francis Hindes Groom’s Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (2nd half of 19th century), but if you have a fast connection and want to download the whole thing, the Internet Archive has it for free (along with many other goodies).