Tuesday 7 March 2006
Coal mining is not an occupation that is usually associated with the elderly, let alone elderly women, but that is exactly what one 80 year old Scottish woman spent her days doing according to new information that has been released by a leading genealogy website.
Data from the 1851 census, which has never before been seen online and is today (Tuesday 7 March 2006) available for the first time at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, discloses that this brave old lady worked as a coal miner at the time the census was taken.
If that wasn’t enough to shock, the census records also include two men over the age of 100 who were married to women less than half their age, proving that Victorian Scotland was perhaps more liberal than was previously thought.
The original handwritten records can now be viewed on the ScotlandsPeople website and they provide a unique insight into life in 1851 Scotland. The records reveal that Lanarkshire had the highest number of female paupers with 1256 and with 445 Perthshire had the highest number of male prisoners.
Dr. Richard Callison of ScotlandsPeople, said:
“Census records are a mine of important historical information and we’ve been working hard over the past few months to make the original records available on the site.
“In doing this we came across some amazing facts and figures as well as entries for a number of famous Scots, for example, the golfer Old Tom Morris who helped establish the Open Championship and went on to win it four times.
“We also found 4,715 people who listed ‘stocking maker’ as their occupation and 1,424 who were described as being ‘straw hat and bonnet makers’. 1851 was also the same year that 61 miners died in a tragic accident in Nitshill, Glasgow and George Lennox Watson, builder of the legendary yacht Britannia was born.”
ScotlandsPeople was launched in 2002 by leading IT company Scotland Online in partnership with the General Register Office for Scotland and now contains over 46 million database records.
The site contains the most comprehensive online set of family history information for any country in the world and is currently one of the largest single information resources on the web.
Raymond Evans, Internet and external services manager at the General Register Office for Scotland, added:
“We are continually updating and adding further records to ScotlandsPeople and in addition to the 1851 census we added a further 100,000 records, with corresponding images, to the site at the turn of the year.”
ScotlandsPeople has proved popular with both home-based and exiled Scots from America, Canada and Australia who are seeking basic information on their background or carrying out in-depth research on their family tree.
With over 320,000 registered users the site also includes a number of free features, including a free surname search where visitors can see how many entries there are under their name in the indexes.
The website provides an easily accessible route to the unrivalled store of Scottish history which is preserved for the nation by the General Register Office for Scotland. Amongst the material available are Old Parish Registers from 1553, indexed digital images of the statutory registers of births for Scotland, 1855-1905, the statutory registers of deaths for Scotland, 1855-1955 and the statutory registers of marriages for Scotland, 1855-1930. The Wills and Testaments are available from 1513-1901 and the census data from 1861-1901.