Censuses, minutes, books, maps, people

Family history research involves a lot of detective work, some easy and inexpensive, some anything but! There are plenty of resources online to construct a family tree of interlinked nuclear families spreading out through cousins and in-laws, spreading back in time up the generations.

But there’s more to a history than the drop-charts that have no life in them, merely the relationships that give essential context for the history. National and parish registers offer occupations of the people involved, offer the parent’s or parents’ names of married couples or births, offer the causes of deaths and these are what start giving the lives and doings of the human beings involved. 

Go further: find local and national censuses that showed where people lived and their neighbours, find newspaper articles, military records, burial places and the inscriptions on gravestones. Go to those places and see the shapes of the hills, cities, rivers, fields, factories known by the people you are researching.

What can the Dingwall Museum records add?

We are housed in the building that was the headquarters of the Dingwall Burgh Council from the time they erected it in the 1730s to 1975 when they voted themselves out of existence in a national local government restructuring. 

For half a century we have held many of the Burgh records of Council meetings since 1707. Who were the councillors? Local landed gentry and the traders of the town. What did they discuss? The affairs of the town: who was to lay the pipework for a water supply, who was to rent the salmon fishery in the river Conon outflow, who was to purchase or rent spaces in new roads to build their homes, who was to be paid for supplying the council with stationery or lime or copper piping. 

The national census details are available to be seen in records offices or online for each of the ten-yearly countings from 1841 to nearly a hundred years later. We have some earlier ones from 1801.