Source:Scotland. Old Parish Registers, Births & Baptisms

Searching for an OPR Birth or Baptism

Parish registers may record the date of birth or the date of baptism or both, but only one or the other will appear in the index. There is no indication given in the index as to whether the entry is a birth or a baptism, but it is more usual for the index entry to show the baptism date.

A The presentation of this website was revised toward the end of 2016. Records are requested by a "search" process which accepts very wide definitions, i.e., it is possible to ask for every pre-1855 record in the whole of Scotland for a specific surname and ask for various spellings to be taken into consideration as well. Unfortunately, it is impossible to request records from a group of nearby counties all at the same time. A successful search returns a list giving the child's name, birth and/or bapismal date, names of the parents (or at least the father), and the parish in which the baptism occurred. The county in which the parish is/was located has been omitted.

However, the record number given with the baptismal details includes a parish number and these parishes numbers link to the same parish in the OPRs, the Statutory Records (post-1855 BMDs) and the Censuses. Parish numbers follow a geographical pattern rather than an alphabetical one. The Registration District Guide is a pdf file which links parishes to their counties.

Using the manuscript record

On selecting a record from the index for further inspection the user is asked for a fee in the form of "credits" (see below) and shown the actual manuscript of the entry.

The parish minister or the session clerk usually assumed responsibility for maintaining the registers, but since there was no standard format employed, record keeping varied enormously from parish to parish and also from year to year. As a result, the information may be sparse, unreliable and difficult to read. The oldest register dates from 1553 (baptisms and banns from Errol, Perthshire), but although there was a requirement from 1552 that parishes record baptisms and marriages, many did not commence until much later, and some more remote areas only have registers from the early 19th century. Some registers have been lost or destroyed and the condition of the surviving registers is variable. The National Records of Scotland holds the surviving original registers.

At best the record will include the name of the child, whether legitimate or not, date of birth and/or date of baptism, father's name, mother's name and maiden surname, place or parish of residence, occupation of the father and names (and sometimes occupations) of witnesses. Occasionally, as in, for example, Dundee, witnesses' relationship to the child (if any) may be recorded.

At worst: the mother's name is not recorded at all between certain years (as in Alyth parish between 1742 and 1786), or that the entry does not record the sex of the child and the name is ambiguous.

Occasionally a minister did not provide his original journal, but a list of baptisms grouped by the parents. Sometimes these include baptisms that took place in a different parish. These can be very helpful, but they cannot be considered primary sources.

Registers of Corrected Entries, abbreviated RCE and formerly titled Registers of Neglected Entries, were compiled for each parish by the Registrar-General after statutory registration began in 1855. These contain a small number of birth entries proved to have occurred between 1801 and 1854, but not entered into the parish registers. These are indexed in a similar format to other OPR entries.

Suggestions

When filling in the blanks on a Search, remember that the default setting is "exact spelling". If you are unsure, particularly if the family name starts Mc or Mac, use one of the other settings.

Although the images and transcriptions provided by the Scottish Record Office are primary sources, it is difficult to give them a collection name in the formal way used by Ancestry and FamilySearch who present the transcriptions as a secondary source.

Since January 2017 the charge for viewing these records is £10 for 40 credits. Viewing one entry costs 6 credits. All payments are made by debit or credit cards through WorldPay. The user will be charged in his/her own currency. There is a lot of information available before a charge is levied. The user is not charged again to look at the same record, even if the two viewings are years apart. Records can be downloaded and saved by the user.