Ancestry Scotland: Meet the genealogist searching for Scottish ancestors over hundreds of years

Here, she spends days immersed in the finest details of people and places from Scotland’s past, searching for even the smallest entry that could unlock a family story, a secret or perhaps even a scandal.

“I love it here, I would take my bed in here - in fact, I would live here,” she says.

Inside the august oak-panelled room, a heavy hush prevails as researchers examine and photograph records pulled from the archives, which are kept in the huge repository of Thomas Thomson House in Sighthill. If you were to lay them all out back to back, the archive would cover around 22 miles.

For those researching family history, these records are the portal to fine detail on past lives once the skeleton of a family tree has been planned out using, for example, the Scotland’s People website, which holds some 100 million records.

The earliest documents that can be accessed at General Register House date from the 12th century. The archive has been built around the pillars of state - church, parliament and courts - as well as records of landowners, estates, prisons and asylums.

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From the very privileged and the powerful to the very poor and dispossessed, Scots of all parts can be found here - if you know where to look for them.

In the historical records room, parchments and papers written perhaps hundreds of years ago are unfolded for a new purpose, their contents relevant once more.

The clerks writing up church records in the 1500s surely could not have imagined that someone wanted to read his work more than 500 years later. But they most certainly do.

“It amazes me the amount of times that I will call out documents, whether it be legal records or estate records and they have never been opened. So you get the original, bound in a very thin piece of jute, and you know nobody has looked at it,” Ms Kinnaird, who has been a professional genealogist since 2012, says.

“That really gets to me looking at something dating to the 1500s and 1600s and I am the first person to open it up. It is clear that nobody has accessed it since then. I find it incredible.”

Today, Ms Kinnaird is looking for information on the ancestors of a client from the United States who lived at Thornton Loch near Dunbar, East Lothian.

Ms Kinnaird has accessed estate papers for the farm dating to 1919. The folder includes fold-out maps, letters to government officials about a potential sale and ledgers which record the amount raised through the sale of turnips.

For the genealogist, these little details of everyday life carry incredible value.

Estate papers are a key source of information given that Scotland was largely a rural population until the 1800s. Ms Kinnaird describes estate papers like a box of chocolates, given you never know what you are going to get.

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“Most people in the 1800s would have lived on estates,” she says. “These papers are a huge social record and the person you are looking for should be recorded somewhere.

“And within estate records, I am still discovering things like militia records that haven’t been indexed and apprenticeship records that haven’t been indexed or recorded.”

Three key pieces of information are usually required - a name, a location and occupation, the latter being a detail that can really accelerate.

“You can easily have the same family who have the same forenames, live in the same parish and have children - who are named the same,” she said. “How can you distinguish them?

“If they were blacksmiths, there may be a smiddy on the estate. That could be your ancestor. You have got a name, an occupation, an estate - fabulous.”

A person can only be confirmed if their existence is triangulated through three independent pieces of evidence. For Ms Kinnaird, the bar must be at least that high.

“You have got to do it thoroughly,” she says. “You would hate to find you have researched the wrong family.”

Of course, not everything was recorded as Scotland’s history took its often deeply turbulent turns. Catholic papers were burnt during the Reformation in 1560 with sporadic record keeping following as the faith was illegalised and pushed underground. The earliest register dates from 1703 and no standard record keeping existed until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829.

Old Parish Records of the Church of Scotland are also patchy in parts while some Gaelic parishes didn’t make written records at all, Ms Kinnaird adds.

As people flowed into cities in the early 19th century for work and the influence of the church weakened, only 30 per cent of life events were being recorded for some urban parishes, it was said at the time.

The Old Parish Registers of the Church of Scotland, which run from the mid 16th century to 1855, are considered one of the bedrock resources for the genealogist, with 3,500 registers holding information on births, baptisms, banns, marriages, deaths and burials. Within these papers, which can also be accessed online through Scotland’s People website, a Pandora's box of detail of everyday people can be gleaned.

The papers of the Kirk of Session - the “judge, jury and executioner” - hold detailed accounts of morality crimes. The long searched for name of the father of an illegitimate child could well be discovered among these statements.

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Keeping records was a key route of income for the church, with every entry commanding a fee, some of which was put into poor relief. Such was the money raised - and the power the transactions afforded over local people - the church resisted moves for record keeping to be moved to state control on nine separate occasions, with the switch to statutory records finally happening in 1855.

Mortcloth records, which documents the fees charged for the use of a ceremonial cloth to place over a coffin or body, are often powerful last sources of information.

“You are looking for when a person was last mentioned,” Ms Kinnaird says. “Before 1855, this was usually in mort cloth records and that allows you to kill them off basically.

“You kill off your ancestors, that is what you have got to do in these searches. Then you find them again - and take them from the cradle to the grave.”

Most of Ms Kinnaird’s clients come from the United States and want to understand where their people lived - and why they left, with Ms Kinnaird mixing data with social history and the wider history of Scotland at the time.

“People want to make sense of the past,” she says. “They always want to come back.”