Jun 24th, 2009
I’ll just make a note of that
My digital record-keeping on my family history is a bit slapdash. Notes are a prime example of this.
I’ve never used anything except a local note. All my notes about a person are piled onto their individual record. Noting a source in correct format depends on how logical I was feeling the day I made the note. They range from Birth: found on 13 June 2009 at scotlandspeople online, GROS numbers incl (pat on the back there) to the cryptic J 09 online (worse than useless). I’ve also got what might be called personality notes such as Aunty Betty used to throw humbugs at her sister when they were 98 and 93 respectively.
Then there’s what I’ll grandly call research notes. Some of these are aide-memoires so that I don’t forget I’ve already tried a particular search (more…)
Apr 15th, 2009
The pound in your sporran
I was talking on the phone yesterday to a local history librarian and learned something I had no idea of.
Apparently, old Scottish currency was not on a par with English sterling. The Bank of Scotland was set up in 1695, primarily to help develop Scotland’s trade, mainly with England and the Low Countries. It began business in February 1696 with a working capital of £120,000 Scots (£10,000 Sterling). And after the Union in 1707, no more Scottish coinage was issued. Today, the Bank of Scotland, that august institution, is a casualty of the economic meltdown.
The old coinage included groats, bonnets (more…)
Apr 14th, 2009
Mors
In my family history research using old church registers, I’ve been coming across some marvellous archaic terms. One is a mortcloth. First large mortcloth, second large mortcloth, first small morcloth, second small mortcloth and even velvit [velvet] mortcloth. The word appears on death records and has a price attached. In my ignorance, I thought it might be the cost of a shroud to bury a person in, but I’m only half right. Googling it, I found this.
A mortcloth (from the Latin word mors, mortis, meaning ‘death’) was a form of pall, i.e. a large cloth (usually black) thrown over a coffin or corpse at a funeral. Mortcloths were kept by kirk (more…)
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