Heritors’ records

Heritors’ records typically include minute books, accounts and financial records, correspondence and letter books. They often include assessment rolls used for levying assessments on heritors, which may be written into the minute books or may be separate documents. Localities of stipend, which identified responsibilities for contributing to the minister’s stipend, are also found in these records and there may also be lists of parish inhabitants and lists of the poor.

Most surviving heritors records are held by the National Records of Scotland.

The overlapping responsibilities of kirk sessions, heritors and (after 1845) parochial boards can result in records of these different bodies being contained in the same volumes.  Although the boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical parishes were not always identical, parochial board records sometimes include pre-1845 material, because they began life as heritors’ or kirk session records. Examples are minute books of the heritors or of a heritors’ committee on the management of the poor’s fund, poor rolls, registers of poor persons, and accounts. Anyone researching poor relief or other matters for a given parish is strongly advised to look at the catalogues to the records of all three of these bodies (kirk sessions, heritors, and parochial boards).