In Family Tree’s February 2022 issue I discussed many types of records that can be used for land research in Scotland. These included resources available online, such as directories, gazetteers and maps, as well as others found only within archives, most notably the all-important sasines registers (pronounced ‘sayzins’!). If you have an interest in a specific property, perhaps for a house history or a oneplace study, there are many additional resources available which can further assist your research.
The history of occupants
A building’s history will of course tie in with the history of its occupation. In the civil records of births, marriages and deaths, as recorded from 1855, and available on ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), we can identify key life events that occurred at a particular property, or which may identify where a person may have lived at a specific point if not at the place where the relevant event happened (e.g. if at a hospital or poorhouse). These records, however, cannot tell us anything about the properties themselves, and unfortunately cannot be searched by a particular address to look for occupants across time. Records such as directories, available in libraries and online at https://archive.org/details/ scottishdirectories, and electoral records, similarly available in libraries (with some also online), can also help to provide names of inhabitants on an annual basis.
What can the census tell us? 1841-1911
The decennial censuses, as recorded every ten years from 1841, can be used similarly, but these can also add further information about the properties concerned. In addition to the specific boundary information given as part of the enumeration data (registration and enumeration districts, parishes, islands, etc), records), FindmyPast () and MyHeritage ().
