Looking for a researcher for family in the scottish borders

[Tom Langley]

Hi, i was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a family tree research service that covered the scottish borders (Mainly Roxburghshire). I did find one but they charged at least £400 for the level of research i would be looking for ie pre Statutory Civil Registration.
The family i want researching is the Knoxs pre 1700.
I was hoping to find someone that charged by the hour. One i have used for Cheshire charged £25 per hour, so you can see why id rather not go to such a price.
Tom

[terianne]

Try the Researchers at the Border Family History Society (see website www.bordersfhs.org.uk) they also run a forum and members have a wide range of local knowledge

or try the Hertiage Hub in Hawick - (run by the local authority and linked to the General Register House in Edinburgh) they can help with research

they should be able to put you in the right direction, but their could be some charges but nothing like the person in cheshire.

Also their is quite a few locals on Rootschat that may point you in the right direction

the sources are available to search yourself and more interesting doing it yourself

Knox is a common name in the Borders and Lothian

[vivdunstan]

If you're looking at Roxburghshire before 1700 please beware that there are very few surviving parish registers from that time. This means that most births, marriages and burials are unrecorded, and it is simply not possible to trace many family trees back in time.

If you have a landed family there may be more success, but even there standard records like wills are largely lost for this area from that time. It makes family tree hunting challenging to say the least! Plus you generally have to learn to accept getting stuck in more recent times

[Tom Langley]

Yes it's becoming more and more apparent that getting further back will be unlikely. I've been lucky so far finding detailed graves and some of the tax records have come in use too!
Tom

[terianne]

curious, Have you tried the IGI (LATTER DAYS SAINT) website Familysearch.  it's free to search records - there got access to the parish register for Scotland, can be a good source, to go further back if you have a good info

[vivdunstan]

Parish registers only go back as far as they survive. For a lot of parishes in the Borders that isn't much earlier than 1700. And FamilySearch can't create records that don't exist.

It's well worth learning the starting dates of the parish registers for the areas you are interested in. For example I give all the starting dates on the GENUKI parish pages for Roxburghshire, Berwickshire, Peeblesshire and Selkirkshire. Look under Church Records on each parish page.

[vivdunstan]

Also the IGI is not a complete index of Church of Scotland parish registers, and misses many events (particularly many baptisms) that weren't added to it. The OPR index at ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, though a pay per view site, is much more complete.

Plus remember non-conformist churches. Some of these have left records. These are not in the IGI and are not in ScotlandsPeople. Generally they are unindexed, and held in the NRS in Edinburgh.

[Ruskie]

Tom, have you asked here on rootschat for help with finding your Knox family? If you start a new thread giving as much information as you can, someone may be able to help you.

[andycand]

Also the IGI is not a complete index of Church of Scotland parish registers, and misses many events (particularly many baptisms) that weren't added to it. The OPR index at ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, though a pay per view site, is much more complete.

Plus remember non-conformist churches. Some of these have left records. These are not in the IGI and are not in ScotlandsPeople. Generally they are unindexed, and held in the NRS in Edinburgh.

Have Scotlandspeople done their own indexing of the OPRs? In the early days it was suggested that SP used the indexing on Familysearch IGI and certainly there seemed to be some evidence to support that suggestion. A batch on the IGI seemed to be female only, a person had information, including the date, that a male relative was christened at that particular church, neither the IGI nor SP brought up a match but by downloading the page from SP of a female christening very close to the relatives christening date found the male relatives christening. Checking SP for other males on the same page found no matches but checking females did find matches.

Andy