Preserving & centralising our family records

I received two CDS of graveyard photos and monumental inscriptions from scots roots. This is a smashing idea from genealogist Helen Grant.  The kirkyards were Pettinain and Dunsyre, both in Lanarkshire. I had high hopes of these, because of all those Somerville families connected with the two villages back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Sadly, there was precious little of my families.  They were obviously too poor to have afforded headstones. I thought I might spend a little time hunting down lair records.  Because, although I have burial records for a few in the Old Parish Records, there’s precious little information there.  Finding a William Somerville, he could be one of five or six – which Somerville family did he belong to?

Back in the 1980s, I first started looking at my family’s history in a random fashion.  One of the things I did (I had access to a car, which makes all the difference) was to visit graveyards. Once, somewhere in Lanarkshire (I don’t remember where) I met the graveyard attendant, who showed me the original lair books dating back to 1700.  I noted the relevant numbers and he showed me where they were in the cemetery, for these were all without headstones. In Cambusnethan, I met the local minister who sat me down with a cup of tea and a piece of cake while he unearthed volume after volume of local records from his bookshelves.

I drifted away from genealogy in the ’90s and so didn’t realise what drastic changes were being made to  historic records at parish and local council level.  When I came back to some serious research, it was to find that parish churches no longer held any records and that millions of local council records had been destroyed. Some bureaucratic historian (or more likely, a committee of bureacratic historians) had decided that in order to preserve these precious records, they must be collected in national archives.  The argument was that they could be preserved  in the correct atmospheric conditions so precious papers would decay no further and that digitisation was the way forward for many records.  Decisions were also made about what was deemed valuable enough to save, for even a national archive could only hold so much.

Bureacrats through the ages have always been keen on the idea of centralisation and integration. Give the power to one central body rather than a hundred disparate local bodies. Much more efficient. Local councils can be pettyfogging and caught up in too much detail. All of that is true of course.

But – and it’s an enormous but – local bureacracy is the kind that painstakingly records the number of nails required for the church door and who came before the local magistrate for felling his neighbour’s apple tree. Local officials take pride in their kirkyards and their history. And they’re part of a local network who share community interests.

Don’t get me wrong, the National Archives of Scotland and the General Record Office for Scotland are impressive organisations.  Awe inspiring repositories and guardians of the documents which shaped Scotland’s history. All kept in perfect climatic conditions and available to view digitally. Much of it is the history of politicians, landowners and great lords.  The makers and shakers of a country’s history.

I know that if records had stayed at local council and parish level, the fabric of them would have deteriorated year on year.  Mould, mice and human sweat would eventually have crumbled the paper into dust.  But how rapid would that have been? We accept current wisdom which says that this piece of paper, if unpreserved, won’t last 50 years.  Yet 20 years ago, I turned the pages of a book that had been continually used for 200 years in a quiet parish church.  The ink had faded a little but its local custodians knew that it should be kept out of sunlight and away from damp and opened only when a new event was recorded or a record checked. It was in reverent and good hands.

Natural catastrophes have of course robbed us of some vital documents – fire, flood and conflict all took their toll.  Isn’t it better therefore to take those documents away so they’ll never again have to risk such catastrophes? Maybe.

We live in a technological age and we’re proud that our technology can preserve our history and display it to the world with such precision. But technology is a sea of shifting sand – the definitive method of preservation will change every few years. And technology factors out the human touch – literally. The records of my ancestors are too precious now to have a human hand upon them, but look how accurately they can be reproduced on a screen.

A computer screen is equivalent to the ‘preserved in aspic’ recipe.  It looks pretty, it’ll last forever (or will it?) but you can’t smell the smell of ages, feel the texture of leather bookcovers or experience the weight of a folio as you lift it from a shelf.

Reading a record in a central archive reading room, where computers gently hum and voices are hushed, is still a thrilling experience.  But it’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to being in the vestry of a church where generations of your ancestors worshipped, opening a large, shabby volume and seeing your great-great-great grandfather’s name written down in the Kirk Session records by the parish clerk. Then wandering around the village kirkyard which has known the footsteps of those whose blood runs in your veins. Maybe meeting somebody in the shop whose name is one of your surnames, a living link.

You know, the records of the past are our past. The folk whose lives are recorded there are our folk.  Why should we have to go to a centralised archive far from where we and they lived to look at those records? Do we know without any doubt that digitalised records will still be accessible and viable in fifty years? No we don’t. Who decided that taking community records out of the community was a good idea? Was it anyone who actually lived in the community or was it a big-city person with big-city ideas? Why wasn’t money given to local custodians who had a personal and passionate connection with their community so they could preserve and conserve the history of that community?

I spent a couple of hours chasing the lair records of one village. The local council only had records from 1926 and they referred me to the Church of Scotland.  The Church (rather loftily and impatiently) told me that they didn’t have the climate conditions necessary to keep such records and that all such records were now in the National Archives of Scotland.

The NAS told me that although burial records have been digitised where they exist, lair records have not been kept. It was suggested to me that there wasn’t anything significant to be found in lair records if you already had a record of burial.  That’s short-sighted archival thinking, not the thinking of a social or family historian. Among Cowans, I found my grandfather’s sister, believed to be buried elsewhere, interred in my grandparents’ lair. There was also an unrecorded baby daughter.  Among Somervilles, I found a family lair containing three generations whose names had been unknown up to then.  Lair records can fill in gaps and add intriguing details to a family’s story.

Preserve our history by all means, but don’t sterilise it, don’t make us view it from behind a screen or only with white gloves.  And give local custodians their rightful place at the centre of their community’s record keeping, don’t have it looked after in some huge archive where the faint footsteps of the common people are eclipsed by the grand event.