Death records – Church of Scotland
Burial registers of Church of Scotland churches before the introduction of civil registration are mainly held by National Records of Scotland (NRS) and are available through the ScotlandsPeople website as part of the ‘Old Parish Registers’ or OPRs. Burial and death registers after 1855 remain the property of the church and therefore should be held by NRS or by a local archives service under the charge and superintendence of NRS.
When civil registration was introduced in 1855, Church of Scotland churches were required to transfer their existing parish registers of deaths or burials to the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh, along with registers of baptisms or births and registers of banns of marriages or marriages.[1] All registers created before 1819 were to be transferred immediately and those created between 1820 and 1855 were to be transferred after 30 years. Not every kirk session complied with this requirement. Some sessions objected, seeing this as interference in church matters by the state. Some records were complicated, with entries of baptisms, marriages and burials included in the same volumes as minutes of session, and in these cases, the cost of making copies of the registers for transmission to Edinburgh could be reimbursed by the government. There are instances where copies were retained by the session and the originals sent to Edinburgh, and vice versa. Some kirk sessions recorded baptisms, burials and marriages in a single register. The National Records of Scotland estimates about a third of parish churches did not maintain burial registers at all.
Registers created after 1855 did not have to be transferred to the General Register Office for Scotland and were generally kept along with other church records. Changes in how burial grounds were run, however, resulted in the transfer of church graveyards to the civil authorities between 1894 and 1925, and so the survival of church burial registers is patchy.
Researchers today therefore should start looking for pre-1855 burial and death registers through ScotlandsPeople. To find out if a burial register is held for a parish, try searching on the OPR death indexes for the parish name alone (i.e. without entering the name of an individual). Then look for any burial registers or mortcloth records held as part of the church records (NRS reference codes CH2 and CH3). For post-1855 burials, look for burial registers in the church records and also in the records of parish councils and their local authority successors.
Related Knowledge Base entries
References
[1] Registration of births, deaths and marriages (Scotland) Act 1854 (17 & 18 Vict. c. 80), s.18.