Place:Wigtown (town), Wigtownshire, Scotland

Appreciation is given to the Gazetteer for Scotland for providing the information below. The royal burgh of Wigtown was the county town of Wigtownshire until 1975. It is located on the west side of Wigtown Bay 7 miles (11 km) south of Newton Stewart. Wigtown was a royal burgh by the late 13th Century (and a burgh of barony in 1341) with a castle nearby on the River Bladnoch. The town is known for its martyrs from the 17th century, including Margaret Lachlan, aged 62, and Margaret Wilson, aged 18, who were tied to a stake in Wigtown Bay and left to drown in the incoming tide. They and other Covenanters who were killed are commemorated in two local monuments, the Martyrs' Monument and by the Martyrs' Stake. The town has two market crosses (1738 and 1816), the remains of the pre 16th-century Old Parish Church and the fine French Gothic-style County Buildings (1863), which now contains a library (2003). Outside the town is the stone circle of Torhousekie, the Wigtown Bay Local Nature Reserve ('Britain's largest'), the Museum (with a scale model of the town in the 18th century), the Galloway Forest Park with goat and deer enclosures, and the Bladnoch Distillery. For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Wigtown. which contains an extensive history of the burgh and of the parish.

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.

Notes for Wigtownshire

• The Dumfries and Galloway Family History Society website may point to material of interest to the general researcher. Amongst their publications are indexes for the 1841 census. These are prepared as small booklets, one for each parish, and are alphabetically indexed transcriptions. Obtainable from the D & G FHS, address at website.
• The FreeCen Project has a searchable (not browsable) transcription of the whole of Wigtownshire online for the 1841, 1851 and 1861 censuses, with the 1871 census partly completed.
• The Wigtownshire Pages is an accumulation of links to various websites with genealogical information about Wigtownshire, including Births, Marriages and Deaths from the Wigtown Free Press, an index of a list of people living in Wigtownshire in 1684, and a small website of monumental inscriptions.
• Wigtownshire Links is a similar webpage to the one above which may include other websites.