Place:City of Aberdeen, Scotland

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

Aberdeen (Scots: Aiberdeen, Scottish Gaelic: Obar Dheathain) is a city in northeast Scotland. It is Scotland's third most populous city, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas and the United Kingdom's 37th most populous built-up area, with an official population estimate of 196,670 for the city of Aberdeen and 228,800 for the local council area. (Population source: Office of National Statistics, 2015)

See Aberdeen for a description of the historic royal burgh which existed until 1975. During the 1960s significant quantities of petroleum was discovered in the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeenshire to be economically viable for extraction. Aberdeen had a very good natural harbour and other facilities and therefore became the main headquarters of the North Sea oil industry in the United Kingdom.

In 1975 the traditional organization of Scotland into shires and burghs was dropped in favour of a system of "regions". Aberdeen became the principal urban area of the Grampian Region which covered the former counties of Aberdeenshire, Kincardineshire, Banffshire and Morayshire.

In 1996 Scotland's local government structure was again reorganized. This time 32 unitary county authorities were set up in place of the six regions that had been in place since 1975. In this reorganization the City of Aberdeen was formed from the original royal burgh of the same name and several parishes surrounding it: Dyce, Newhills, Nigg (in Kincardineshire), Old Machar, and Peterculter.

Research Tips

• Scotlands People, the website of the Scottish Register Office provides

• official civil (from 1855) and parish registers (from when first produced) for births, marriages and deaths for all of Scotland
• original census images for all years available (1841-1911).
• references to wills and property taxes, and
• an extensive collection of local maps.

This site is extremely easy to use. There are charges for parish register entries and censuses. The charges are reasonable and payable by online transfer.

• The Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online provides access to digitised and fully searchable versions of both the Old Statistical Account (1791-99) and the New Statistical Account (1834-45). These uniquely rich and detailed parish reports, usually written by local Church of Scotland ministers, detail social conditions in Scotland and are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Scottish history.
• Scotlands Places
• Gazetteer of Scotland includes descriptions of individual parishes from F. H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-4)
• The FamilySearch Wiki
• GENUKI which provides, amongst other data, complete quotations from A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland (1851) by Samuel Lewis, John Bartholomew's A Gazetteer of the British Isles (1877), and A New History of Aberdeenshire edited by Alexander Smith (1875)
• A list of Burial Grounds in Scotland is now available on the website of the Scottish Association of Family History Societies.
• Aberdeenshire and Moray Records. Town Council minutes, accounts, letters, plans and harbour records provided by Aberdeenshire Council plus other local records.
• Aberdeen and North-East Scotland Family History Society is one of the largest and most reputable family history societies in Scotland and has a long list of publications referring to individual parishes.