Category: Meta

Goals for my Melrose one-place study in 2018

Looking ahead to the New Year I thought I’d jot down things that I’d like to tackle in this area in the next 12 months.

Now that I have a new website for the one-place study which I’m happy with the focus is on adding more content, both transcripts and indexes, and interesting new blog posts.

I’d like, for example, to extend my lists of surnames per address in Melrose parish to include names recorded by pursuers, defenders and others in the Melrose regality court cases between 1657 and 1676. There are thousands of people recorded in these local court records, and unsurprisingly certain surnames recur in certain areas.

From the Melrose parish registers in transcript form published by the Scottish Record Society I’d like to analyse the causes of death in the mortality roll for the parish in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Likewise I’d like to start indexing the scattered miscellaneous lists of people in there. And also those years including kirk session minutes, including cases of fornication, illegitimate births etc.

My Melrose WW1 servicemen and women project is still ongoing, with new material to be added online soon. Hopefully in 2018 I can get photographs of the Melrose Roll of Honour, including those who survived as well as died, allowing me to add many more names to the list online here. Meanwhile I will continue to research the names I already have.

I have lots of ideas for new blog posts to add, about interesting people, places and events. For example I found many characters in the mid 17th century court records, that would be well worth including.

I’d also like to blog more about unusual sources, for example Roy’s military map and Melrose parish, and forgotten Melrose parish place names as revealed by Blaeu’s 1654 atlas and the much later Ordnance Survey name books.

Many ideas anyway. Looking forward to it!

Goals for Melrose one-place study in 2013

As we near the end of another year and approach the start of a new one I thought I’d blog about my goals for this blog and the related one-place study for the year ahead.

My first priority will be to digitise the various references to Melrose-dwellers I’ve extracted from 18th century tax references. These are from a mix of sources such as servant tax records, and farm horse tax. All potentially useful for genealogists tracing their family tree, and it shouldn’t take me much time to digitise them and put them online.

Another priority is to create a detailed person index to the 17th century regality court records. In the original Scottish History Society publications there is an index at the back of names, but it doesn’t give more details in the index about the people such as their occupations and places of residence. I have extracted this detail from the court records, and could easily prepare a much more useful index including for each person any extra information recorded such as address, occupation, and any relatives, and put this online.

Longer-term I want to start to reconstitute the population, but that’s a long-term goal. For now I am focusing on putting useful indexes and other resources online.