What are bills of mortality?
Bills of mortality are abstracts from death registers showing the numbers of people who have died in a place, parish, burgh, island, country, or some other part of the country, during a given year or some other period of time. Examples survive from the 17th century onwards. The form that these take and the amount of information within any bill of mortality depended on the purposes of the bill and the practice of the body or individual who compiled it. Some bills of mortality are purely statistical and were devised and published to provide information on the progress of certain diseases. Some parishes in Scotland kept separate bills of mortality in the form of a list of those who died in the parish in any given year, giving the date of death, the name and sometimes the designation and age of each of the deceased. They survive (for some parishes) among old parish registers (OPRs), in some cases as an alternative to registers of death or burial. Prior to 1855 the principal source of information about deaths in Scotland is the collection of OPRs of baptisms, marriages and burials held by National Records of Scotland. For more information about OPRs and how to search for these online, go to the ScotlandsPeople website. <https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/> [accessed 24 April 2024]