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Read about your parish in the Old and New Statistical Accounts, on www.edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/.

The Old or First Statistical Account (1791-9) was the work of ‘Agricultural’ Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754-1835), MP for Caithness. In 1790, desiring ‘to elucidate the Natural History and Political State of Scotland’, he sent a detailed questionnaire to each parish minister, asking about geography, climate, natural resources and social customs. He received all manner of different answers, including a lot of idiosyncratic notes, and published the lot.

The New or Second Statistical Account was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1832. It included maps of the counties and took evidence from schoolmasters and doctors as well as ministers. It was published in volumes between 1834 and 1845. For Assynt, Sutherland, for example, we learn ‘There is no register of date previous to 1798. Since that period, births and marriages have been recorded with tolerable regularity, but there is no register of deaths’, and the population was 1800 in 1760, 2419 in 1801, and 3161 in 1831, divided into 375 families, and 1400 of the population was attached to the church and parish of ‘Store’ (Stoer).

A Third Statistical Account was created between 1951 and 1992 and can be inspected in libraries. A Fourth Statistical Account of East Lothian is on its way.

Volume 20 of the Old Statistical Account has a ‘List of Parishes suppressed, annexed to other parishes, or which have changed their names, with a corresponding List of the Parishes under which they are now included’.

Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754-1835), who initiated the First Statistical Account of Scotland.