Source:Scotland. Old Parish Registers, Deaths & Burials

The Old Parish Registers (OPRs) comprise the records of births and baptisms, banns and marriages and deaths and burials kept by individual parishes of the Established Church (Church of Scotland) before the introduction of civil registration in 1855.

These are the records of the Church of Scotland or Presbyterian Church.

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. Death registers were not included in the regulations of 1552.

For a fuller discussion see ScotlandsPeople Guide to Church Registers under the heading "Burials and Death". You may have to login to see this information, but you will not have to pay to see it.

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 marriage 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.