How is a village made?

I’ve been homing in on a village in Lanarkshire where four generations of my Somerville ancestors lived.

As it was a small village (around 500 people in the 1850s and possibly less than that in earlier centuries), it’s possible to get a fair overall view of who lived there and how the village families were inter-related.  I did a blanket search for Somerville BMDs 1538-1854 in the Old Parish Records on scotlandspeople and came to the conclusion that this family (or families) must have made up a majority of the population for nigh on two centuries. The records, by the way,  date back to a little before the Scottish Reformation and end as national registration takes over from the parish records.

As for women marrying into the family, I  tracked the surnames of  my great (x3, x4 & x5) grandmothers – Janet Graham, Janet Lewars & Agnus Fisher.  And yesterday I made a list of every other surname that connects to Somerville.  Forty names in all.  I then searched for births 1538-1854 for each name.

There was nothing before 1689 and it looked as if the village sprang into life in the space of those four years between 1689 and 1693. There were eight family names, including mine,  who had more than 20 babies born in those years.  Gibson family births (I have a Grizel Gibson marrying a Somerville) for 1689-1854 numbered 126 and there were 178 Smiths from 1691. These families must have represented a significant presence in the village for a hundred and fifty years (roughly 5 or 6 generations), long after my Somervilles had moved on.

Other early families (again those with more than 20 births for those four years) were Dickson, Thomson, Young, Brown and of course Somerville.

However, the picture painted by these online records can be misleading. In my families there were about four times as many births as deaths recorded.  Registering a child’s birth wasn’t compulsory in the 1690s but when it was done (often when the child was only a few days old), it was the date of baptism.  The fledgeling Church of Scotland would have been a powerful influence on those god-fearing families.

Very few deaths were registered as such and usually were noted only when mortcloth dues or the fee for the tolling of a bell for the departed were paid.  The poorer villagers would have had neither of these rites to see them to their graves – instead, only a rough shroud and an unmarked plot in the burial ground.

The other factor that can mislead is something I hadn’t considered.  There’s evidence to suggest that the village’s parish church (still standing today although without its own minister) was constructed on an ancient site dating back at least to the reign of David I of Scotland (1083-1153).  But the church in which my ancestors worshipped was largely built during the 18th century, with a belfry whose bell is stamped with the date 1692. Accordingly, the kirk records date from 1689.

I’m going to try to look at the Kirk Session records which are held at the National Archives of Scotland, who I spoke to today. There are 18 volumes over a 150 year period.  Unfortunately, the originals are too fragile to be handled so what I’ll get to look at is a high definition digitised copy. Included in those records will be some if not all of the  BMDs as well as parish accounts and other church matters.  In those days,  the church expounded on moral matters and the local Commisary Courts on matters legal.

These documents aren’t going to be easy and it will be slow going – it’s not for nothing that the Archives have a pamphlet called ‘How to read early Scottish handwriting’.

What’s next is to find when the village actually came into existence.  The kirk records begin in 1689, but there may well be other records which take me further back into history.  I hope there are. The Somerville name goes back, I know, to a generation after the Norman Conquest when one William de Somerville was granted lands in Lanarkshire. A great proportion of his descendants and the descendants of his peasants remained in the heartland around Carnwath and are there today.

Not content with finding my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Samuel Somervel there in the village in the 1670s, I’d love to find more of these Somervilles whose name originated in a small town near Caen in Normandy.