Place:Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland

NameEdinburgh
Alt namesAlata castrasource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Alatius burgussource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Anedasource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Duneideannsource: Canby, Historic Places (1984) I, 266-67
Dùn Èideannsource: Wikipedia
Edenburgumsource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Edimbourgsource: Rand McNally Atlas (1986) I-82
Edimburgosource: Rand McNally Atlas (1986) I-82
Edinburgumsource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Edinumsource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Puellarum castrasource: Orbis Latinus (1971) p 9
Edinburgh Parishsource: equivalent to Edinburgh in 19th century
TypeCity, Parish
Coordinates55.935°N 3.2165°W
Located inMidlothian, Scotland     ( - 1975)
See alsoLothian, Scotlandadministrative region 1975-1996
City of Edinburgh, Scotlandunitary Council Area since 1996
source: Family History Library Catalog
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

image:Midlothian.jpg

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and the and seat of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government. (Both parliament and government are currently semi-independent of the government of the United Kingdom based in London, England. See the references in Wikipedia and elsewhere for details.) The city is located in the southeast of Scotland on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. It had a population of nearly 500,000 in 2011.

For genealogical purposes, Edinburgh was a parish--an area for which entries of births, marriages and death were made--according to Civil Regulations since 1855, and for the Church of Scotland prior to that date. It was located in the former county of Midlothian which disappeared in 1975 following the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1974. The parish had an area of 137.1 sq. km (52.9 sq. miles) and included, in addition to the original parish of Edinburgh, a number of communities which were parishes in their own right until being absorbed into the conurbation. The City of Edinburgh is now a unitary Council Area indicated in blue on the map above. Counties and parishes are no longer entities of Scottish government structure.

The main parish developed around the Church of St Giles, situated on the High Street in the Old Town of Edinburgh. The parish church has records for births and marriages dating from 1595. The Church of St. Giles was the principal church of many places of worship that served the original parish.

The parishes of St. Cuthbert's (also known as the West Kirk) and Canongate (the area east of the Old Town including Holyrood) were added to Edinburgh at sometime during the 19th century. (The exact dates have not been found.)

Contents

More notes about St Cuthbert’s

The parish church has records for births dating from 1573, for marriages from 1744 and for deaths from 1740.
"St Cuthberts or West Church Parish - It is not perfectly easy to draw a precise line between the suburbs and the country, and therefore it is necessary to mention that the inhabitants of Lauriston, Tollcross, Castlebarns, Fountainbridge, West Church Charity Workhouse, Water of Leith, Stockbridge, Silvermills, Canonmills, Broughton and Leith Walk are included in the numbers stated for the suburbs." (From the Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-1799, Vol II)
Scottish Places provides a description of the church itself.

More notes about Canongate

The parish church has records for births dating from 1564, for marriages from 1564 and for deaths from 1565. Canongate was absorbed into Edinburgh in 1856, along with another community further east named Portsburgh. "The burgh of Canongate, being a village to Edinburgh is governed by a baron baillie, and two resident magistrates annually chosen by the Town Council of that city. Their jurisdiction extends beyond the bounds of the parish, to the east side of the Pleasance, and to the town on North Leith.” (From the Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-1799, Vol II).
Scottish Places provides a description of the church itself.

Other parishes that became part of Edinburgh

Further parishes, which were usually also independent burghs, were added to Edinburgh over the century and a half 1850-2000. Some of these parishes were located in the county of West Lothian. Each of these has its own page on WeRelate.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Early history

The earliest known human habitation in the Edinburgh area was at Cramond, where evidence was found of a Mesolithic camp site dated to c. 8500 BC. Traces of later Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have been found on Castle Rock, Arthur's Seat, Craiglockhart Hill and the Pentland Hills.

When the Romans arrived in Lothian at the end of the 1st century AD, they found a Brittonic Celtic tribe whose name they recorded as the Votadini. The Votadini transitioned into the Gododdin kingdom in the Early Middle Ages, with Eidyn serving as one of the kingdom's districts. During this period, the Castle Rock site, thought to have been the stronghold of Din Eidyn, emerged as the kingdom's major centre. The medieval poem Y Gododdin describes a war band from across the Brittonic world who gathered in Eidyn before a fateful raid; this may describe a historical event around AD 600.

In 638, the Gododdin stronghold was besieged by forces loyal to King Oswald of Northumbria, and around this time control of Lothian passed to the Angles. Their influence continued for the next three centuries until around 950, when, during the reign of Indulf, son of Constantine II, the "burh" (fortress), named in the 10th-century Pictish Chronicle as oppidum Eden, was abandoned to the Scots. It thenceforth remained, for the most part, under their jurisdiction.

The royal burgh was founded by King David I in the early 12th century on land belonging to the Crown, though the date of its charter is unknown. The first documentary evidence of the medieval burgh is a royal charter, , by King David I granting a toft in to the Priory of Dunfermline. Edinburgh was largely in English hands from 1291 to 1314 and from 1333 to 1341, during the Wars of Scottish Independence. When the English invaded Scotland in 1298, King Edward I chose not to enter the English controlled town of Edinburgh but passed by with his army.

In the middle of the 14th century, the French chronicler Jean Froissart described it as the capital of Scotland (c. 1365), and James III (1451–88) referred to it in the 15th century as "the principal burgh of our kingdom". Despite the destruction caused by an English assault in 1544, the town slowly recovered, and was at the centre of events in the 16th-century Scottish Reformation and 17th-century Wars of the Covenant. In 1582, Edinburgh's town council was given a royal charter by King James VI permitting the establishment of a university; founded as Tounis College (Town's College), the institution developed into the University of Edinburgh, which contributed to Edinburgh's central intellectual role in subsequent centuries.

17th century

In 1603, King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne, uniting the crowns of Scotland and England in a personal union known as the Union of the Crowns, though Scotland remained, in all other respects, a separate kingdom. In 1638, King Charles I's attempt to introduce Anglican church forms in Scotland encountered stiff Presbyterian opposition culminating in the conflicts of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Subsequent Scottish support for Charles Stuart's restoration to the throne of England resulted in Edinburgh's occupation by Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth of England forces – the New Model Army – in 1650.

In the 17th century, Edinburgh's boundaries were still defined by the city's defensive town walls. As a result, the city's growing population was accommodated by increasing the height of the houses. Buildings of 11 storeys or more were common, and have been described as forerunners of the modern-day skyscraper. Most of these old structures were replaced by the predominantly Victorian buildings seen in today's Old Town. In 1611 an act of parliament created the High Constables of Edinburgh to keep order in the city, thought to be the oldest statutory police force in the world.

18th century

Following the Treaty of Union in 1706, the Parliaments of England and Scotland passed Acts of Union in 1706 and 1707 respectively, uniting the two kingdoms in the Kingdom of Great Britain effective from 1 May 1707. As a consequence, the Parliament of Scotland merged with the Parliament of England to form the Parliament of Great Britain, which sat at Westminster in London. The Union was opposed by many Scots, resulting in riots in the city.

By the first half of the 18th century, Edinburgh was described as one of Europe's most densely populated, overcrowded and unsanitary towns. Visitors were struck by the fact that the social classes shared the same urban space, even inhabiting the same tenement buildings; although here a form of social segregation did prevail, whereby shopkeepers and tradesmen tended to occupy the cheaper-to-rent cellars and garrets, while the more well-to-do professional classes occupied the more expensive middle storeys.

During the Jacobite rising of 1745, Edinburgh was briefly occupied by the Jacobite "Highland Army" before its march into England. After its eventual defeat at Culloden, there followed a period of reprisals and pacification, largely directed at the rebellious clans. In Edinburgh, the Town Council, keen to emulate London by initiating city improvements and expansion to the north of the castle, reaffirmed its belief in the Union and loyalty to the Hanoverian monarch George III by its choice of names for the streets of the New Town: for example, Rose Street and Thistle Street; and for the royal family, George Street, Queen Street, Hanover Street, Frederick Street and Princes Street (in honour of George's two sons).

In the second half of the century, the city was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, when thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton and Joseph Black were familiar figures in its streets. Edinburgh became a major intellectual centre, earning it the nickname "Athens of the North" because of its many neo-classical buildings and reputation for learning, recalling ancient Athens. In the 18th-century novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett one character describes Edinburgh as a "hotbed of genius". Edinburgh was also a major centre for the Scottish book trade. The highly successful London bookseller Andrew Millar was apprenticed there to James McEuen.

From the 1770s onwards, the professional and business classes gradually deserted the Old Town in favour of the more elegant "one-family" residences of the New Town, a migration that changed the city's social character. According to the foremost historian of this development, "Unity of social feeling was one of the most valuable heritages of old Edinburgh, and its disappearance was widely and properly lamented."

19th and 20th centuries

Despite an enduring myth to the contrary, Edinburgh became an industrial centre with its traditional industries of printing, brewing and distilling continuing to grow in the 19th century and joined by new industries such as rubber works, engineering works and others. By 1821, Edinburgh had been overtaken by Glasgow as Scotland's largest city. The city centre between Princes Street and George Street became a major commercial and shopping district, a development partly stimulated by the arrival of railways in the 1840s. The Old Town became an increasingly dilapidated, overcrowded slum with high mortality rates. Improvements carried out under Lord Provost William Chambers in the 1860s began the transformation of the area into the predominantly Victorian Old Town seen today. More improvements followed in the early 20th century as a result of the work of Patrick Geddes, but relative economic stagnation during the two world wars and beyond saw the Old Town deteriorate further before major slum clearance in the 1960s and 1970s began to reverse the process. University building developments which transformed the George Square and Potterrow areas proved highly controversial.

Since the 1990s a new "financial district", including the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, has grown mainly on demolished railway property to the west of the castle, stretching into Fountainbridge, a run-down 19th-century industrial suburb which has undergone radical change since the 1980s with the demise of industrial and brewery premises. This ongoing development has enabled Edinburgh to maintain its place as the United Kingdom's second largest financial and administrative centre after London. Financial services now account for a third of all commercial office space in the city. The development of Edinburgh Park, a new business and technology park covering , west of the city centre, has also contributed to the District Council's strategy for the city's major economic regeneration.[1]

In 1998, the Scotland Act, which came into force the following year, established a devolved Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive (renamed the Scottish Government since September 2007). Both based in Edinburgh, they are responsible for governing Scotland while reserved matters such as defence, foreign affairs and some elements of income tax remain the responsibility of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in London.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Edinburgh., especially the sections “Geography” which discusses the various neighbourhoods of Edinburgh, “Demography” (particularly the “Historical” subsection, “Religion” (on Church of Scotland and non Church of Scotland Christian denominations), and “Governance” and “Economy”.

Research Tips

Sources for Old Parish Registers Records, Vital Records and Censuses

  • Scotland's People This is a pay website providing vital statistics and census data for all of Scotland with original images. There is a description at Scotland under Genealogical Resources.

Further Sources of Reference

Please note and respect the copyright warnings on these websites.

  • GENUKI article on Edinburgh. The contributor lists several books of reference under "Bibliography".
  • Scottish Places article on the parish of Edinburgh. The tabs of the right provide more information, and comparitive maps.
  • FamilySearch Wiki article on Edinburgh providing direct reference to FamilySearch holdings on many topics with respect to the city.
  • The National Library of Scotland have a website devoted to maps from the 1600s right up to the present. Comparisons of modern-day and old maps of the same place can be made. From the home page click on "Find by place" and then follow the instructions on the next page. Once you are viewing the place you want, use the slider <----> at the top of the map to compare the layout of roads and the place names of smaller areas, perhaps even farms, with the landscape today. The website takes some getting used to. The One-inch 2nd edition, Scotland, 1898-1904 OS is a series of maps with the parishes delineated. Each of these maps cover an area of 18 x 24 miles and will zoom to comfortable reading size with a couple of mouse clicks on the map itself. Unfortunately, they are not geo-referenced, and it is necessary to go to the OS One Inch 1885-1900 series to locate places by latitude and longitude.
  • The Statistical Accounts for Scotland In the 1790s and again in the 1830s, the ministers of the all the parishes of the Church of Scotland were asked to provide a description of their parish to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The original account request included 160 questions to be answered. These accounts are available in print in 20 volumes and are also online where it is freely available to browse. The browsing portal is below the viewing area of most computer screens. Scroll down to "For non-subscribers" and click on "Browse scanned pages". This brings you to another page on which one can enter the name of the parish in which you are interested.
  • Excerpts from The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical and Historical, edited by Francis H. Groome and originally published in parts by Thomas C. Jack, Grange Publishing Works, Edinburgh between 1882 and 1885 are provided by Scottish Places. Selections from Groome and other gazetteers from the 19th century are also found on GENUKI.


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Edinburgh. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.