KEY 20TH CENTURY SCOTTISH RESOURCES
Nails are being bitten, teeth are slowly chattering, and nerves are growing ever more frayed, as Scots around the world patiently await the release of the 1921 Census. All good things come to those who wait, but if pinning all of your hopes on breaking through a brick wall with the 1921 census, have you truly already consulted all of the additional resources currently available which might also help? In this article I will take a look at some of the key 20th century resources available, and perhaps a few that you may not be quite so familiar with.
THE ESSENTIAL STARTING POINT
The essential starting point for the 20th century are, of course, the registers for civil registration, first established in 1855. These records of births, marriages and deaths for Scotland uniquely within the United Kingdom list the names of both parents, allowing us with relative ease to confirm that a candidate of interest is the same person within each type of record. In addition to the names of parents to a child, birth records also uniquely note the date and place of their marriage, a detail not provided in other British equivalents, which can help us to find their marriage record.
A marriage record in turn will note the ages of the two spouses, and their own parents’ names, allowing the location of their own birth records to be found with relative ease. Death records can usually be just as easily located to complete the story, with those for women indexed under both married and maiden
