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Scotland (Counties as in 1851-1901) => Scotland => Lanarkshire => Topic started by: OhioHogue on Friday 10 November 17 11:04 GMT (UK)
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I recently downloaded a will inventory from an ancestor that spoke of him being a tenant of "Gladstone-Borland" and "Greenshields"
Looking at old maps and descriptions, I put "Gladstone-Borland" and "Greenshields" between Walston and Libberton (east and west) and Newbigging and Whitecastle (north and south).
Can someone help me understand what these apparent farms were or if they were just farms where folks worked. What does it mean to be a "tenant" here? Would records have been kept? Where can I find records? Did folks work and live here, or just one or the other?
Not only am I trying to find ancestors, I'm trying to understand the time and place they lived to better understand who I find. Thank you for any understanding.
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https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&hl=en-GB&q=Gladstone-Borland%22%20and%20%22Greenshields%22
Hi,
The above link is a Planning Application to develop the site of these farms. It gives an accurate description of their location.
Somewhere to start!!
Andrew
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Related topic http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=782272.0
Libberton is a rural parish in Lanarkshire (not to be confused with the parish of Liberton just south of Edinburgh, in Midlothian). There is a small village called Libberton, clustered round the parish kirk. http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NS9942
Gladstone and Gladstone Bor(e)land are farms a few miles east of the village http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0342
Greenshields is a farm about a mile north-west of Gladstone Boreland
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0243
You can see them, and other farms which are no longer in existence, on the mid-19th century six-inch-to-the-mile map http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=15&lat=55.6743&lon=-3.5369&layers=5&b=1
They were just farms where people lived and worked. People generally lived on the farms where they worked, so where there is just one farm house nowadays there would probably also have been several cottages where the married farm workers lived with their families. Unmarried male workers might live together in a bothy, and unmarried female workers would often live in the farm house.
Most farmers were tenants, that is, they rented their farm from the landowner rather than owning the land themselves.
As for records, it depends on what records you are looking for and when.
Some estates' rental records have survived, others have not. You need, first, to find out who owned the land. You can usually find that out by looking at the Valuation Rolls, which list the name of the farm or house, the name of the proprietor, the name of the tenant, and the name of the occupant. However the detailed valuation rolls don't start until the late 19th century. Some VRs can be accessed at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
Once you know who owned the land, you can find out whether they owned it when your people lived there by looking the place or estate up in the Registers of Sasines. A sasine is a record of change of ownership of land or buildings, so there is no point looking there for records of tenants. The Registers of Sasines are not available online. You have to go (or get someone to go for you) to the Historical Search Room in Edinburgh, where there is a computerised list of sasines from 1780 onwards. There are printed indexes to sasines before 1780, but they are organised by the name of the owner so you have to get back to 1780 by other means.
Once you know who owned the land at the time your people lived there, you can search for estate papers via the Scottish Archive Network http://www.scan.org.uk/ to see whether there are any records of your people.
For background reading try the Statistical Accounts of Scotland
http://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/viewer/osa-vol2-Parish_record_for_Libberton_and_Quothquan_in_the_county_of_Lanark_in_volume_2_of_account_1/
and
http://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/viewer/nsa-vol6-Parish_record_for_Libberton_and_Quothquan_in_the_county_of_Lanark_in_volume_6_of_account_2/
In this context it may be useful to know that 'heritor' effectively means 'landowner'.
Hope this helps.
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Thank you very much. This gives me a lot to research, study and understand!
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I should have said that Newbigging is a very common place name in Scotland. There is one about 3 miles north-east from Libberton village and a similar distance north-west of Gladstone http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0145 but I think this is in the parish of Carnwath.
Whitecastle is about a mile south of Greenshields http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0141