OLD PAROCHIAL REGISTERS
Birth and death are the two unavoidable events of human life. For many people, marriage comes as a significant third. Humankind usually seeks to celebrate these events, and for the Christian Church, they are the grounds of the sacraments of baptism of the new born and of marriage, and the rite of the burial of the dead.
Since written records began, the births, deaths and marriages of princes and some other great people have been recorded, but for centuries those of lesser folk were mostly unrecorded. We died to be forgotten. Admittedly, the Old lestament lists genealogies of the Jewish people of that time, and there are reports of such records being gathered in Greek and Roman times and in medieval France and Italy. But if any such records were compiled in Scotland before the mid-l6th century, they have not survived. In post-medieval Europe, the first serious attempt at registration was enacted in Spain in 1497. Organised by parish, the motivation was to ensure that marriages were not within the prohibited degrees. In England, registration was begun by an Act in 1538, requiring every parson to maintain a register in which to record every wedding, christening and burial within his parish.
Both in Scotland and in England, the parish was the administrative area of government closest to daily lives of the people. Civil and ecclesiastical in character, it existed not only to regulate religious observances and moral behaviour but also to provide education and poor relief. Because of its small size and the familiarity of its presiding clergyman with its inhabitants, it provided the best location within which to keep registers of what are today sometimes known as “hatches, matches and despatches”.
In Scotland, there were a series of enactments by both Church and State to establish parish registers during the times of religious change in the later 16th and 17th centuries. In 1552, a provincial council of the Roman Catholic Scottish clergy ordained that every parish should keep a register of baptisms and a register of-proclamations of marriage. In 1565, a Protestant General Assembly of the Church of Scotland instructed every minister, once they had been provided with a manse and glebe, to keep a register of persons deceased in their parish. Though the earliest surviving register, that of the parish of Errol, dates from 1553, the number of subsequent instructions from both Church and State authorities, along with our knowledge of the registers which survive throughout the country, show that in many parts of Scotland, registration was slow to catch on.
Now, why was registration of baptisms, marriages and deaths so important? Ihe Kirk was responsible for the moral welfare of its parishioners and by baptism and marriage ceremonies sought to have control over them. Also, a child who had a recognised father was the responsibility of that father and would not be a financial burden on the parish. But the more important reasons were legal. The attempt to register deaths in 1565 was in order “that pupils {childrenj and creditors he not defrauded”, in other words to ensure that the wealth of the dead person went to those entitled to it.
Registration meant publicity and, it was hoped, reliability. In 1616, the Scottish Government, by an Act of the Privy Council, ordered that a register be kept in every parish of persons married, baptised or deceased, because diverse questions often arose in the law courts which depended on accurate information of the times of marriages, baptisms and decease of persons. It was fondly hoped that such a register would provide conclusive proof in family disputes, usually over inheritance.
Unfortunately, the keeping of these registers over the next two hundred years was not as satisfactory or reliable as the Privy Council had intended. The minister of Hawick in the 1 790s admitted “There is no exact register kept of marriages, baptisms or burials” and lots of other ministers confessed that their parish registers were “imperfectly kept”. While it is not always clear whether absent records have gone astray or were never compiled in the first place, it is apparent that the surviving records of the more remote parishes tend to start very late, at the end of the 18th century or even in the 19th.
The Western Isles are particularly badly served. Even where the records of a parish started earlier, few of the series are in any way complete.Assuming that they were created in the first place, why is it that so many volumes of this valuable record have not survived? It should be remembered that the parish registers were the responsibility of the parish minister and kirk session. They were compiled either by the minister or the session clerk who was usually the local schoolmaster. The register volumes and notes from which the volumes were to be compiled would be kept in the manse or the schoolmaster’s house. Both men would have had other important commitments. Let us now consider probable reasons why these important records so often have disappeared.
(1) Fire. If the manse or the schoolmaster’s house caught fire, then any registers therein would probably burn too. In the days of wood or coal or peat fires and of candles there was always a fire risk. In the parish of Muthill, a register for 1704 to 1760 had to be compiled from peoples’ memories or their jottings ‘the original Registers of that time having been burnt in the Session-Clerk’s house with several things of his own”.
(2) Water. A register of the parish of Abertarff was lost when accidentally dropped into a rapid stream, which the custodian was crossing. But a more common fate was for the paper volumes to moulder away through being kept in damp attics or cellars or out-houses.
(3) Rodents. Volumes stored away and not consulted regularly were ideal fodder for hungry mice.
(4) Borrowing. As one of the purposes of keeping such registers was to provide evidence in courts of law, it is hardly surprising that registers were borrowed for that purpose. Unfortunately, once borrowed, there was no certainty that a register would be returned, instead hiding in a lawyer’s office, whether locally or in Edinburgh.
