Scottish Civil BMD Registrations on FamilySearch

In Scottish Census and OPRs on FamilySearch I covered the available census returns and Old Parish Registers on FamilySearch. In this post I'm going to look another collection of Scottish records on FamilySearch, the civil registrations.

For civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths in Scotland I had almost always made use of ScotlandsPeople. That was until I came across "Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956" on FamilySearch. Now this collection only has the years 1855-1875, 1881, and 1891 but any time I can save a pound or two in my research I will gladly take it. Researcher beware, it does take a multi-step process to find the correct images and it is not as straight forward as just clicking a button, paying your 6 credits, and viewing the record. So patience and some practice will be needed. Like the other FamilySearch Scottish collections I mentioned in Scottish Census and OPRs on FamilySearch, you will need to visit your local Family History Center to do the work.

The Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956 is composed of two parts, indexes and registrations. The indexes are broken down by year and the registrations are broken down by parish/registration district number and year. Depending on the year, the indexes are also broken down along gender lines. Some of the districts and years have been indexed by FamilySearch but most haven't so you will probably have to follow these steps.

Screen capture of McKinlay in Males, A-Z 1855 index in Scotland, Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956, (The New Register House, Edinburgh); FHL 103244.

Here is an example of an index entry for a number of McKinlay births from the Males A-Z, 1855 index. The one of particular interest for me is that of James McKinlay registered in Paisley (High), number 387.

To make use of this index I first need to translate the registration parish from "Paisley (High)" into a number. To do that, go to the National Records of Scotland Registration Districts page and download the Parishes and Registration Districts of Scotland by name guide. Next, look through the name guide under the "RD Name" or "Registration District" column for the parish.

Screen capture for Paisley from the Parishes and Registration Districts of Scotland by name guide from the National Records of Scotland Registration Districts web page.

As you can see, there are a number of Paisley registration districts. However, in this example we are looking for the period starting from 1855 for one that has "High" in it. It looks to be number 573/1 since we want the district number as it was known back then. We also know that it is in the "County or Burgh" of Renfrew.

I could also have searched for James McKinlay on ScotlandsPeople. The searching on ScotlandsPeople is free but it will cost you money to view the images.

Screen capture of ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk for a search of the 1855 birth of James McKinlay.

Here it gives us the same information as found on the index on FamilySearch but without having to translate the registration district name into a number. The reference is broken down into two parts, the registration district, 573/1, followed by the number of the registration, 387.

We can head back to FamilySearch and the Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956 to look for the digitized microfilm that has the parish/registration district holding the births we are interested in.

Screen capture of births for Scotland, Renfrew County, Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956, (The New Register House, Edinburgh); FamilySearch Catalog 79310.

Just a heads up, the parish/registration microfilms aren't in alphabetical order but in numeric order by registration district/parish number. As you can see, the parish numbers for this part of Renfrew County follow the numbers from Buteshire. But don't let that confuse you too much.

For the 1855 birth registrations in parish/registration number 573/1 which can be found in Renfrewshire we will need to click on the camera icon for film 103367 (DGS 8045422). If you are trying to do this from home you probably have a key icon just above the camera icon. This means that you need to go to your local Family History Center to view the images.

Screen capture of births for Scotland, Renfrew County, Registers of births, marriages, and deaths, 1855-1875, 1881, 1891; and general index, 1855-1956, (The New Register House, Edinburgh); DGS 8045422.

Once you can view the digitized microfilms you will need to scan through the various images to locate the start of the parish/registration district you are interested in. Fortunately it isn't very hard to do and, once you get used to doing it, the microfilm pages with the district names and numbers will almost pop out for you. Next you need to find the page with number 387 on it.

In the case of James McKinlay I was very lucky to have him born in that year. When the civil registrations started in 1855 they used two pages to ask for the information. This meant I got a bit more important information about his parents that I wouldn't get in following years. But it also means I need to stitch together two microfilm images...but that process was already covered in my post Genealogy and Microfilm ICE.

You can do the same sort of searching for marriages and deaths that were registered between 1855 and 1875 along with the decennial census years 1881 and 1891.

One drawback of what is available on FamilySearch in this collection is that the Register of Corrected Entries (RCE) is not available. These are the documents referred to in a birth, marriage, or death registration that has corrections or updates to the registration. If there is a marginal note to a RCE then you definitely want to view that document. If that happens you will need to use ScotlandsPeople and pay to view the record.

I certainly hope that this helps you out in researching your Scottish ancestors.

Scottish Census Returns and OPRs on FamilySearch

I was recently wanting to retrieve census returns along with baptism, birth, and marriage registrations for several potentially connected branches of my Murdoch and McKinlay family that resided in Scotland. Normally I would head over to ScotlandsPeople and pay a few pounds to quickly access those records from the comfort of my home. However, being on a tight research budget for my own genealogy and family history, I was feeling a bit frugal and decided to see what FamilySearch had available.

First of all, the fine folks at FamilySearch have digitized the census returns of Scotland for the following decennial enumerations:

1841	Residence on 6 Jun 1841. Enumerators were instructed to round down the ages of persons 15 years and over to the nearest five years. Hence a given age of 28 would be recorded as 25, one of 63 as 60 and so on. If a person lied about their age, this, combined with the rounding down, could severely distort the actual age. You will find instances where enumerators did not adhere to this instruction on age and inserted the given age.
1851	Residence on 30 Mar 1851.
1861	Residence on 7 Apr 1861.
1871	Residence on 2 Apr 1871.
1881	Residence on 3 Apr 1881.
1891	Residence on 5 Apr 1891.

Due to the efforts of many volunteers the census returns have been indexed to make our lives a bit easier when trying to find our ancestors. Unfortunately the images of those records aren't available from home. Yet that's not too much of a problem for me since there is a Family History Center in Ottawa that isn't too far from where I live, even if I use public transit.

Once at the Family History Center I was able to search for the people I wanted to find in those census years. Then, by clicking on the image presented, I quickly viewed and saved the pages from the census returns to a USB stick. Of course I also made sure I saved the pages that described the enumeration districts in question.

1871 census of Scotland, Lanarkshire, Blythwood, Civil Parish of Barony, enumeration district (ED) 10, Description of enumeration district; FHL microfilm 104,026, image 465.

FamilySearch also has a number of the Old Parish Registers or OPRs searchable on their site. Again the images are only viewable from your Family History Center. But they are searchable on FamilySearch.

Other than expending time to save some money why would you want to use FamilySearch and not ScotlandsPeople to look through the census returns and Old Parish Registers?

On ScotlandsPeople there are 14 recorded Church of Scotland marriages in the Parish of Eastwood in Renfrewshire for people with the last name of McKinlay. To view all of those images it would require me to purchase 84 credits on ScotlandsPeople. That works out to be 2.8 packs of 30 credits. Since I can't purchase fractions of credit packs I would have to buy 3 bundles of 30 credits for a total of £22.5 or about $38 Canadian.

Instead I can copy the list from ScotlandsPeople into a spreadsheet to create a to do list for my visit to my local Family History Center. A check on FamilySearch reveals that the Parish registers for Eastwood, 1674-1854 are digitized and indexed. However, yet again the images are available for viewing only at the Family History Center. With this collection being indexed I can search FamilySearch from home using film number 001041057 to also create a to do list for my next visit.

Of course, the Family History Centers are only open on specific days and times and they do frown upon you wearing your pyjamas at their computers. Yet if you have a number of these records to review the necessity of having to get dressed and visiting your local Family History Center may just outweigh this inconvenience.

Next time I will write about some of the Scottish civil birth, marriage, and death registrations that are freely available on FamilySearch and how you can find them.

This hobby of ours can get quite expensive at times so finding ways to save money can be a big win.

Genealogy and Microsoft ICE

Normally I write about the various resources, paper and digital, and processes that I make use of when I try to solve a problem in my genealogy and family history research. Today's post is a little bit different. I'm writing about a piece of software that I have found to be invaluable in dealing with digitized images: Microsoft Image Composite Editor or ICE. For those that don't have a Microsoft Windows based system, unfortunately this tool won't help you out since it is for Windows 64-bit and 32-bit systems only. And if you like to spend money in your genealogy research then I have to disappoint you. ICE is free. Yes, you read that correctly, this is a FREE although unsupported product from Microsoft.

So just what is this tool and why do I find it so useful?

From the Microsoft page for their Image Composite Editor, where you can also download the installation package, they describe the product as:

"Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates high-resolution panoramas that seamlessly combine original images. ICE can also create panoramas from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom."

So how does this apply to my genealogy research?

Many of the probate files and land records have documents that are so big that you can't fit the whole image of the page on the screen of the microfilm reader. If you are doing your transcriptions right then and there you probably have no issues but what if you want to save an image of the page for either later transcribing or for archive purposes on your computer. You need to take several partial pictures of the page to capture everything and somehow stitch them together into one page later on.

Wouldn't it be nice to take the images of those pages and stitch them together to create a single page?

Before	After

Just a second...stitch them together? That's in the description of ICE! Keep in mind that even though a panorama is thought of as a horizontal picture ICE can also do the same to vertical images.

Before we begin here are a few key things to keep in mind:

• The images that you have must have some overlap. The more the better (20% seems to work well) but I have worked with images with only 10% overlap.
• Whenever possible save your original images from the microfilm reader as TIF. This format can create very large files but all the quality is preserved.
• Try to save the images from the microfilm reader with a name that make some sense and flags that the image file is just one of several. I usually save the image file with a letter after the page number. For example, 03a and 03b are the parts of page 3 that I need to reassemble with ICE.

ICE is easy to use but I'll walk through a simple stitching together of two images into a single page.

Here I have started a new Image Composite Editor session by importing the two parts of page 15 from the estate file of Abraham Hoover, dated 30 Sep 1831, from the Lincoln County (Ontario, Canada) Surrogate Court Estate Files (1794-1859) found on the Archives of Ontario microfilm MS-8411. These are the two images from the "Before" above.

I don't do anything fancy and just leave it as a "Simple Panorama" on the import screen.

Next I click on the Stitch button and let the computer do its magic. If all works well a single page is created and displayed on the screen.

If all looks good it is on to step 3, "Crop". ICE shows what it believes the image should be cropped. But you can adjust the boundaries as you see fit.

In this case, I got rid of a bit of the black on the top and side and also the bit at the bottom from the next page.

Finally we can save the image by clicking on the "Export" button at the top. If the images were originally as TIF files, I will always export the final image as a "TIFF Image". If you want to save it as a JPEG image make sure you select "Superb" for the image quality. Once you have selected the file format to use click on the the "Export to disk" button and give the new image file a name. In my case it will be "15.tif" since it is a combination of the images 15a and 15b.

Depending on how you work, and of course after verifying that the resulting image is correct, you can now delete the original image files, 15a.tif and 15b.tif in this case.

This tool may also help stitch together those multi-page passenger lists that you find on Ancestry, Findmypast, and other genealogy sites. But it will all depend on how much overlap exists between the pages. Your mileage may vary.

Hopefully this piece of free software will help you in your genealogy research challenges as you hunt down and save to your computer those crucial documents that help you break through the annoying brick walls.