Data sets

This project aims to link civil registers and census material for the second half of the nineteenth century to produce longitudinal data sets, rich in spatial and social information from both sources. The stock, or snapshot, data from censuses include information on household size and structure, housing, occupation, and place of birth (yielding life-time migration), while the flow data on births, deaths and marriages provide information pertaining to the timing and dynamics of family formation and dissolution through death.

Microfilms of the decennial censuses for the years 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901 are currently available. A machine-readable version of the 1881 census was already available, but the others have been transcribed onto a computer database. Special permission was granted by the General Register Office, Edinburgh, for access to the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths, and the records for the relevant places were also transcribed onto a computer database by a project worker in Edinburgh.

Once the five census databases and the births, deaths and marriages are available for each place, individuals in each source can be linked together using a 'sets of related individuals approach' in a relational data-base system with specially designed computer algorithms.

Under the terms of the agreement with the General Register Office for Scotland, the completed data sets will be returned to them, and transcriptions of the census material annotated to include the year of birth, death or marriage of an individual (but no other details of these events) will be deposited at the ESRC data archive in Essex.

Numbers of records for Skye, Kilmarnock, Torthorwald and Rothiemay