Place:Tayside Region, Scotland

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

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

Tayside was one of the nine regions used for local government in Scotland from 15 May 1975 to 31 March 1996. The region was named for the River Tay.

It was created by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, following recommendations made by the 1969 Wheatley Report which attempted to replace the mishmash of counties, cities, burghs and districts, with a uniform two-tier system of regional and district councils. Since the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994, the former Tayside has been divided into the council areas of Angus, the City of Dundee and Perth and Kinross, which had previously been the region's districts.

Tayside Regional Council directly operated local bus services in the City of Dundee from 1975 until 1986, when bus deregulation under terms of the Transport Act 1985 was implemented. The restructured Tayside Buses became employee-owned in 1991, was sold to National Express in 1997, and today trades as Xplore Dundee.

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).
• collections of wills and testaments and
• property tax listings
• an extensive collection of local maps
• kirk session records for individual parishes (added in 2021 and not yet complete).

This site is extremely easy to use. There are charges for parish register entries, collections of wills, and census listings (the 1881 census is free to view, also on Ancestry and FindMyPast). The charges are reasonable and payable by online transfer. Viewing the kirk session records is free, but a charge will be made for a copy.

• The National Library of Scotland have an online map collection of historic and modern day maps which can zoom in on a specific farmhouse or street in a town. Their collection also includes London and some counties of southeast England.
• Gazetteer for Scotland contains an article for each parish from the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland by F. H. Groome, (published 1882-4) and short details about each parish today including names of small settlements within a parish.
• The FamilySearch Wiki explains a great many legal terms only found in Scotland and provides a gazetteer for genealogists for each parish across the county. It reviews the availablility of parish registers.
• GENUKI Scotland which provides for each Scottish parish (indexed by county), 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 possibly other gazetteers from individual counties and regions. It is worth reviewing one of its county pages to see what is available online or in print from local archive providers. Each county page has a "Where in ---shire is .... ? section--very helpful in pinpointing the small places below parish level.
• A list of Burial Grounds in Scotland is now available on the website of the Scottish Association of Family History Societies.
• 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.