Arthur WILSON & Ann WEIR proclamation of Marriage 1840
30 May Old Monkland, Lanarkshire
Arthur Wilson in this parish & Ann Weir in the Barony parish of Glasgow have given in their names in order As? proclamation of banns. 3 Days. [O.P.R. Marriages 652/00 0030 0159 OLD MONKLAND OR COATBRIDGE]
31 May Barony, Lanarkshire
Arthur Wilson farm servant Old Monkland Parish & Ann Weir residing in Barony Parish
[O.P.R. MARRIAGES 622/00 0180 0039 BARONY]
can't find actual marriage.
You won't find anything more than you already have. The kirk was more interested in ensuring that the correct procedure was gone through, i.e. the intended marriage was proclaimed three times from the pulpit of the parish kirk or, if the couple lived in different parishes, both pulpits. Once the proclamations had been completed, they often didn't bother to record the actual marriage ceremony.
Last year I visited Mitchell Library, Glasgow & West Scotland FHS in Glasgow and North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre, Motherwell and all the very kind and helpful people told me the same thing, "That is all you will find. If it's not on ScotlandsPeople it is not there."
I am hoping RC members may know better.
With very, very few exceptions, all these people are quite right. If it's not on SP it doesn't exist.
So what are the exceptions?
In 1855, when statutory civil registration began, the Registrar General was empowered to requisition all the parish registers of the Church of Scotland, and with very few exceptions they did get them, and took them into safe keeping.
SP has also arranged with the Roman Catholic Church to digitise all the RC baptism, banns and burial records, and they have digitised and indexed the majority of those records of other Presbyterian churches which are held in the National Records of Scotland.
The biggest gap in the records available on SP is the surviving registers of the Scottish Episcopal Church. These have not been gathered into a central repository, and are hence not available for SP to digitise. Some remain in the churches, some are in diocesan archives and some are in university or local archives. There are also a few registers of other Presbyterian denominations, Methodist, Congregational and other Protestant churches, and records of any non-Christian organisations, if indeed they exist before 1855.
Estimates of the number of baptisms missing from the surviving records vary. In my tree I have 5896 pre-1855 births, but I have only seen 4132 of their baptism records. So there are 1764 people whose baptisms I have not found, which is about 30%.