Searching for Scottish Ancestors

Oor first breath is the beginning o' daith

A day out to visit your gravestone sounds macabre today, yet three or four hundred years ago your Scots ancestors would have taken pride in showing off to friends their personal or family stone in the kirkyard. Just as it was a sign of sufficient wealth and importance to lay claim to reserved pews in the local church, so it was you could pay to have your stone placed in the kirkyard itself while you were still hale and hearty, and could afford it. It was satisfying to know it was waiting for you. Memento Mori was often carved on these stones -remember you will die.

Carved symbols were more important than names in the 17th and early 18th century headstones. The skull, crossbones and hourglass were a reminder of the mortality of man, whereas an angel blowing a trumpet, or a winged head promised ascension to heaven, at least for the chosen elect. Symbols of a craft might be carved - a mason's trowel, a smith's hammer, a gardener's pruning hook, and sometimes but not always initials and a date. To the North side of every church was an area devoid of stones, reserved for the poor, the outcast and strangers. Even from the grave the family of means could assert their separateness from the anonymous mass.

But upright headstones for a grave, or a future grave, was a relatively recent innovation. Formerly the stones were laid over the grave, and these slabs or thrughstanes were to cover the corpse until the day of Resurrection. In parts of the north-western Highlands up to the 1700's, the slabs had a more prosaic purpose. The rocky terrain and thin soil often only allowed for the digging of shallow graves. The slabs over the graves then offered some protection from scavenging wolves. Even so, this problem became so great in some areas that the crofters took to rowing their dead over to off-shore islands to bury their relatives in wolf-free terrain.

Scots have no particular fear or fascination about death, and yet it has played a huge role in the making or unmaking of so many of our historical figures. Who does not know the story of William Wallace hung, drawn and quartered for his belief in freedom. Then there was the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots on the orders of Queen Elizabeth, the torturing to death of Covenanters in the Killing Times, the hanging of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare.

The poet Robert Burns describes the scene in Kirk Alloway graveyard through the eyes of Tam o'Shanter:

A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;
Twa span-lang, wee unchristen'd bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape
Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape.
A garter, that a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father's throat had mangled..

Unlike baptisms and marriages, the Old Parish Registers for Scotland up to 1854 did not make a full record of burials. Some parishes carry lists of deaths for some years, others write the names of those who hired mort-cloths, to cover the coffin in church. Out in the kirkyards the situation is not much better for the ancestor hunter. Most of the original records of old churchyards and cemeteries have been lost. Many of the older gravestones themselves have become so eroded that their faces are no longer readable, others are missing or even buried. And yet local Family History Societies and individuals have been doing, and are still doing, a great task in transcribing all the inscriptions and details of symbols on headstones in their local cemeteries. It will be many years before this is complete, and years again before any sort of county or national index is produced, but those interested in Monumental Inscriptions should check what is currently available through the Scottish Genealogy Society at www.sol.co.uk/s/scotgensoc/sales.htm

And if all this tale of death has got you thinking about your own mortality - Memento Mori - and what might grace your gravestone one day, spare a thought for an Edinburgh resident whose stone reads:

Erected to the memory of John Macfarlane
Drown'd in the Water of Leith
By a few affectionate friends.

If you want to know more take a look at my website scotroots.com.

You can reach Brian by email at scotroots.com.