Kirk Session Minutes
For the next blog in this series I’m going to look at Scottish kirk session minutes and how useful these can be for finding out about your Scottish ancestors. I’ve also included one of the stories I have uncovered while doing research using these records, which I hope you find interesting.
Presbyterian Church records in Scotland include kirk session minutes, proclamations of banns, communion rolls, seat rent books and poor relief accounts. The kirk session minutes are of interest to the genealogist or family historian, with Presbyterian ancestors, for the richness of the detail they contain. They can provide information about your ancestors beyond births, marriages and deaths and for the period before statutory registration of these events.
The Presbyterian kirks in Scotland often kept very detailed minutes of the kirk sessions. These were regular meetings with the minister and the kirk elders on the kirk’s business. As well as being responsible for the spiritual needs of the congregation, the kirk sessions were concerned about the congregation’s morality and also managed poor relief before the 1845 Scottish Poor Law Act. The amount of detail provided varied from parish to parish and kirk to kirk, but generally speaking, where records survive, they contain detailed accounts of the immoral behavior in the parish, poor relief requests and payments and other community concerns. Those who were guilty of misdemeanors were rebuked by the session. Usually this meant standing before the congregation or the session and admitting their sins. In the earlier records the most regularly chastised people were often unmarried mothers. Mothers sought help from the kirk to force the father to provide financially for their child or if they wanted their child christened. The kirk, on the other hand, wanted to ensure that they were not paying poor relief when it wasn’t necessary. They had a vested interest in shaming the father into paying and ensuring that they only helped those local to the parish. Sometimes the session negotiated reciprocal agreements with other parishes, as poor relief was meant to be paid by the parish of birth or long-term residency.
When tracing your Scottish ancestors, kirk session minutes can be useful in finding out the parentage of illegitimate children, providing stories about hardship and other details of the lives of the congregation. They are also a good source for ancestors who were elders, ministers or teachers.
Church of Scotland kirk session minutes are available to view, free of charge, at the National Records of Scotland (NRS). Records go back as far as 1569 and include minutes from other Presbyterian churches that united with the Church of Scotland at various times. NRS have digitized these records but you have to view them on site at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh (at time of writing this is closed due to Covid-19). Not all minutes are available and you should check before you go that the minutes you require are available and make a note of the catalogue number, before you visit in person. You can find the catalogue number by searching the National Records of Scotland online catalogue on their website and entering the parish or church name and the time period you are interested in. The records are not indexed so you have to browse the records to find entries of interest, though many have names and subjects of entries recorded in the margins. If you have not visited these archives before then please read instructions for visitors on the NRS website.
David Alexander and the Free Church in Carlops
In 1843 about 40% of minsters and congregations split from the Established Church of Scotland and formed the Free Church of Scotland. One of the reasons for the split was to eliminate the control that landowners and business elites had in the selection of ministers for the kirk. In towns and villages, where a big percentage of the congregation joined the Free Church, new premises had to be found to worship in and sometimes provide schooling for children of adherents to the new church.
David Alexander was the innkeeper at the Ramsey Inn in Carlops, a small village about 10 miles south-west of Edinburgh. He was one of a large number of the residents of Carlops who broke with the Established Church and joined the Free Church. Mr Alexander became an elder of the new kirk session and a contributor to the fund to provide church and school premises in the village.
The village had been founded on handloom weaving and was now in decline with little wealth. The kirk session minutes, for the new Free Church, chart the struggle for funding to provide premises for worship and a day school. Mr Alexander provided a hayloft initially and after more than a year enough subscriptions had been collected, from villagers and those in the environs, to purchase a house for conversion to a place of worship and a day school. The names of many of the subscribers, their jobs and place of residence are listed in the minutes. Also included is a description of the work done, who did it and the names of the teachers appointed by the session. Mr Edmunds was appointed as day school teacher in November 1844. He was favoured by the parents, but he eventually left to take up a more profitable role in Torphican in January 1846 as there were not enough paying pupils to make his job profitable. The day school continued and the Free Kirk funded many places for poor pupils but there was still a high turnaround of teachers.
The story told in the kirk session minutes shows how a relatively poor community tried very hard and succeeded to provide a day school for their children and premises to worship, without interference from the heritors. If you have ancestors that lived in or near Carlops around this time, you may well find them mentioned in these minutes. If you can’t visit the archives then you can contact me to do so on your behalf.
Reference at NRS, CH3/429/7, Carlops Free Church minutes
The image accompanying this blog is an extract from Drainie Kirk session minutes. Reproduced with permission from the National Records of Scotland.