in 1855 you will learn where the deceased was born and how long they had lived in the place where they died.
in 1855 you will find the names and ages of children born to the deceased, plus their age(s) at death, if applicable.
the period 1855-60 records where the deceased was buried.
You may find a reference to the Register of Corrected Entries, that will include an entry from a sheriff court (see pp. 100-1) investigating any unusual or accidental deaths. These references are worth following up, as you may learn additional details about the deceased’s family. Any unusual deaths may have been reported in local newspapers too.
Death certificate for Walter Hooks (1877-1968), showing his parents’ names (courtesy of Mrs Moira Crowley).
Death traditions
Gaelic-speaking Scots believed that the soul stayed close to the corpse until after burial, so they introduced the custom of the Late Wake, watching the body constantly until burial, lamenting and singing, and even dancing and playing games: wakes were not necessarily somber or sober affairs. Anne Ross, in Folklore of the Scottish Highlands (Tempus, 2000), reports that ‘At the funeral of one of the lairds of Culloden the mourners were entertained so liberally before leaving Culloden House that when they did start for the Churchyard of Inverness they left the coffin behind! At another funeral a similar mistake occurred, and was only discovered when the party arrived at the churchyard and the sexton remarked, “It’s a grand funeral, but whaur’s Jean?”’
Some areas had their own death customs: in Soay, for example, a lock of the dead man’s hair was nailed to the door lintel to keep the fairies out. Some clans and families had special traditions, especially surrounding portents of death, for example, the Breadalbanes knew a family death was coming when they heard a bull roaring on the hillside at night, and for the MacLachlans, the appearance of a small bird foretold doom.
Lateral thinking Conquers all
This list of deaths in a family bible came to the Crowley family from their aunt Sissy, who in turn had it from a Margaret Hunt Conquer, who died without close family in 1953. The list was intriguing because Hunt was a middle name in the Crowley family too, from Sissy’s paternal grandmother Ellen Hunt, wife of James Crowley, who had married in Ireland in 1851 before the potato famine drove them to migrate to Scotland.
We used the list to look up the death records, which rapidly turned the list into a family tree. Margaret’s death record gave her parents as Robert Conquer and Catherine Adelaide Hunt. Catherine Adelaide Hunt’s death listed her parents as John Hunt and Catherine Kelly, proving she was a sister of Ellen Crowley, née Hunt.
It’s always worth following up any new leads you find in family history, so I investigated Catherine further, finding her marriage to Robert Conquer in 1868 and her appearance in the 1881 census with a hitherto unknown sister, Charlotte. Investigating Charlotte produced a real surprise, for in the 1861 census she was living in Edinburgh with her Irish-born parents, John and Catherine: before then, we had no idea that they had come over from Ireland too.
When Charlotte married in 1868, John and Catherine were both alive, but neither were found in the 1871 census. This narrowed down the period when they must have died, and we found Catherine’s death reported in 1869. This listed her parents, Hubert Kelly, a crofter, and Ellen, née Denny. These were Sissy’s great-great-grandparents, and would have been born in the late 1700s: they had probably never set foot in Scotland, and most likely don’t appear in any Irish records either – yet through this piece of lateral genealogy their names have been found again.
The 1861 census entry revealing the unexpected presence in Scotland of the Irish-born John and Catherine Hunt.
Margaret Hunt Conquer
Minor Registers
These tend to record people who were born, married or died abroad. If you cannot find what you want in normal General Registration, look in the minor registers – you never know. On ScotlandsPeople, select ‘minor records’ from the drop-down county menu. If the person you expect to find does not appear, try the equivalent events-abroad records of the Registrar General in London (that effectively cover ‘the British’): these are indexed at www.findmypast.com.
The GROS Minor Records include:
Air Register from 1948 of births (where one parent normally lived in Scotland), and deaths (of people who normally lived in Scotland) on British aircraft anywhere in the world.
Consular Returns of birth and death from 1914 and marriage from 1917 registered with British consuls, for people ‘of Scottish descent or birth’.
Foreign Returns (1860-1965): births of children of Scottish parentage, ‘based on evidence submitted by the parents and due consideration of such evidence’ and marriage and deaths of Scottish subjects.
High Commission Returns (from 1964) of births and deaths of children ‘born of Scottish descent in certain Commonwealth countries’.
Marine Register (from 1855) of births on British merchant ships at sea, where one of the child’s parents was usually resident in Scotland, and deaths of people normally resident in Scotland: and also deaths of Royal Navy and Royal Marine personnel (including Reservists) during wartime.
Armed Services: births include Army Returns of ‘births of Scottish persons at military stations abroad’ 1881-1959; Service Departments Registers from 1959 for births of children of Scottish residents in the armed forces; marriages of Scots serving at military stations abroad; Service Returns of deaths of Scottish persons at military stations abroad (1881-1959); Service Departments Registers of deaths ‘outside the United Kingdom of persons ordinarily resident in Scotland who are serving in or employed by HM Forces, including families of members of the Forces (from 1959)’; War Returns of deaths of Scottish soldiers in the Boer War (1899-1902); Scottish soldiers and sailors in the First World War, except for commissioned officers, who are included in the First World War deaths at TNA, Kew
An army recruitment poster for the First World War showing young men having a wonderful time. There was no hint that the recruits might well end up in a foreign grave. The records of the unfortunate dead are part of the GROS’s ‘Minor Records’.
Army deaths
Many Scots served in the British Army (see pp. 104-8), and many died on active service.
War memorials are found all over Scotland. This one, at Uig, Lewis, includes the tragic deaths of servicemen on the Iolaire. On 1 January 1919, the ship was carrying servicemen home to Lewis after the First World War when it struck a rock and sank just outside Stornoway harbour, drowning 205 of them within a stone’s throw of safety. Scarcely a family in Lewis was unaffected. In Uig, we were told of an old lady who had died only recently, whose father conceived her before he left for the war. He survived the horrors of the trenches, but then drowned before he ever held his little daughter.
War graves