Tracing Your Scottish Rural Ancestors

If you have ancestors who owned or worked on farms here are a couple of databases you may wish to check out. The information you are seeking may not be online, but you can certainly send a query to the archivist for each database.

ROYAL HIGHLAND AND AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY OF SCOTLAND

http://www.scottishrecordsassociation.org/summaries_004.htm 

This database holds History and Accounts for the Society as well as information pertaining to their Shows & Competitions. Additionally, they have records for:

~St Kilda

~Agricultural Statistics

and what they classify as Miscellany:

~Aberdeenshire quarries, manuscript accounts by James Blaikie; 

~Descriptions, memoirs and reports of coalfields;

~Argyll Naval fund accounts and applications;

~Scottish Agricultural Committee for Relief of the Allies letter;

~Scottish Red Cross Agriculture Fund papers  

 

SCOTLAND'S RURAL PAST

http://www.scotlandsruralpast.org.uk/ 

This database is looking to compile information about the "vanishing settlements and landscapes" that once dotted the country.

 

RNIB Archives Collection Makes its Home at LHSA

The Lothian Health Services Archives have added the records of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to their collections, held at the University of Edinburgh. 

The RNIB started as a charity known as the Edinburgh Society for Promoting Reading Amongst The Blind on Moon's System (a braille-like reading system). The Edinburgh Society helped blind persons who were not living in institutions. The RNIB archives shows that many relied on additional income from various activities such as hawking, knitting, selling tea, housekeeping or music. 

The archive collection consists of annual reports and conference reports covering more than 130 years. The aim of the LHSA is to make this collection available to researchers. 

The Lothian Health Services Archives can be found at: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/

 

Tombstone Tuesday - Symbolism

During my visit last year to the Glasgow Necropolis, I was taken by the symbolism in the monuments. Of course there were the standard ones (Celtic):

But others were less obvious in their meaning. Like these ones, for example:

While these two appear to have been vandalized, they were, in fact, planned this way. The symbolism here is that the person for whom the monument was erected was "cut down in the prime of his life" One being only 37 at the time of his death!

Records of Scottish Bakers Union

The records for the Scottish Bakers and Confectioners Union (Aberdeen Branch) are among the holdings of the University of Aberdeen. The records available include:

• Minutes 1922 - 1948
• Contribution books 1922 - 1949
• Cash books 1922 - 1944
• Insurance benefit records 1950 - 1954

http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/features/0701scotbac.html

Sharing Family Stories, Photos and More

One of the great ways to keep in touch and to gather family stories, photos, memories, recipes etc is through social media. There are a couple of websites dedicated to making this happen. One is MyHeritage: http://www.myheritage.com/ While this is primarily a "wiki" of cloud storage for your family tree MyHeritage also allows you to create a family website where you can invite other family members to share via photo uploads, share family news and print off the family tree. In someways it serves as an online family newsletter. Members must be invited to join the site, keeping it private.

• MyHeritage is free to use. However, the capacity of members on  your family tree at the free level is 250. My grandfather fathered 21 children, so you can imagine how useful that capacity is.
• MyHeritage offers a free record match. I have less than a handful of people who were or are in the US, yet all 79 record matches are US records.
• MyHeritage is a huge conglomerate. Since their launch 10 years ago, they have been in the business of acquisition, most recently acquiring FamilyLink and Geni.

The other website is Rootsy.com: http://www.rootsy.com/. Rootsy is also private where people are required to login after receiving an invitation to join. Rootsy is new and, by their own admission, run by a small group of entrepreneurs. I'm guessing this group are Google aficionados. The pages are very simplistic. Nothing is clickable. There is no way to upload a Gedcom, meaning a big make work project for people who are actually interested in genealogy. It takes an inordinate amount of time to log in. I have yet to find where or how to upload photos, videos, share recipes, invite others, share news.....

Maybe one day, someone will launch a site that actually allows families to easily and quickly stay in touch and to share.

Tombstone Tuesday

In keeping with today's theme, here is a tombstone from the Glasgow Necropolis. It is for a stage actor. Such a wealth of information contained within the monumental inscription.

This headstone is a "testament" to a stage actor.

 

 

Here you can see the "curtains" on the stage

 

 

 

The obituary and to some degree, the eulogy,

is contained within the words on this amazing tombstone.

Museum of Freemasons Online Collection

The Library and Museum of Freemasonry is digitizing and making part of their collection available online. The first step is the Masonic Periodicals. Access to searchable digital copies of the major English Masonic publications are available at: http://mpol2.cch.kcl.ac.uk/Olive/ODE/MasonicLibrary/ 

Other digital items held by the museum are searchable as well. A simple search (author, title, subject) can be done at: http://www.freemasonry.london.museum/catalogue.php