Kirk sessions were formal minuted meetings of a parish minister with the elders of his church. The online availability of kirk session records from ScotlandsPeople is excellent news.
Civil registration came to Scotland in 1855. Before that date the main resource is the old parish registers.
These have serious inadequacies. In Alan Stewart’s book My Ancestor was Scottish is a table showing by county the number of baptisms in the Old Parish Registers of 1854 compared with the number under the new compulsory Civil Registration of 1855. The figures are startling; in all cases except Orkney and Shetland they are much lower in 1854. In many cases (eg Ayrshire) they are less than 50% of the 1855 figure.
Specific factors affecting Old Parish Register registration are as follows:
Baptisms: In England, even illegitimate children were likely to be baptised, though the vicar/ rector might write ‘baseborn’ by the name. In Scotland they were not usually baptised. Indeed, ministers could withhold what they called ‘the Christian privileges’ from anyone they considered immoral.
In the Old Parish Registers the banns of marriage were proclaimed. But many people went to more or less unlicensed ministers in other towns and villages to get married. There were several in Edinburgh. Some were Episcopalians but the exact status of many is obscure. Furthermore, Scotland
