Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 32

Your chances of success in tracing your Scottish family history, and of deriving enormous enjoyment from doing so, will be greatly enhanced by spending some time finding out about the places where your family lived.

Trying to trace a family tree without studying where people lived makes no sense. Knowing whether the parish was a Highland or Lowland one makes a massive difference in understanding the sort of people who lived there. Were your people from an isolated Highland crofting district, a coastal settlement dependant on kelp and fish, a comfortable Lowland farming community or a prosperous royal burgh? You also need to know about the place to start working out what records it is likely to have generated, and where these will be found. If the area was subject to a franchise court, its records could be searched. Which commissary and sheriff’s courts had jurisdiction there? The more you know, the better.

A farmer at Stroncruby tills his field using a horse-drawn plough, while his bull grazes the pasture and a goat makes do further up the mountain, from Hume’s 1774 Survey of Assynt, Map 11 (courtesy of Lord Strathnaver).