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Scotland (Counties as in 1851-1901) => Scotland => Moray (Elginshire) => Topic started by: coffieqween on Tuesday 04 June 13 21:53 BST (UK)
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Hello
I am trying to find out the parents of Robert Cumming born abt 1698 in Elgin, Moray, according to the baptism record of Alex (Alexander) Cumming born 08/08/1730 his parents are the said Robert Cumming and Christian Allan (born bat 1702). I have been unable to find a marriage record for Robert Cumming and Christian Allan and can only assume they were not officially married, if any one can help or point me in the right direction to find this information, I am currently using Ancestry.co.uk and ScotlandsPeople for my research.
Many Thanks
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The Old Parish Registers for Scotland are notoriously incomplete when you go back so far: in fact many parishes hadn't even started keeping one. I've just checked the ScotlandsPeople list of surviving OPRs for Elgin and they have baptisms for 1609-1679 and then from 1705-31 but if records were being kept from 1680 to 1705 then they haven't survived. Marriage records for Elgin only start in 1705.
Just because there isn't a surviving marriage record in the OPR doesn't mean they weren't married, although an irregular marriage is always a possibility. It often means, however, that the record of their marriage either never made it into the OPR in the first place, or it did and the OPR for that year was lost, destroyed, or is illegible.
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When stuck like this, a possibility is to look at all the baptisms in the parish. Your ancestors may have witnessed the baptisms of relatives and relatives may have witnessed the baptisms of the children of your ancestors. I have found several people this way. Look at the index to see if there are other children born to Alexander and Christian, or if there are other Cumming baptisms which may be of Alexander's nieces and nephews.
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Hi JMStrachan and GR2
Thank you for the advise I will try looking at other baptisim records for possible family members.
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I have been unable to find a marriage record for Robert Cumming and Christian Allan and can only assume they were not officially married.
The more logical assumption, given the date, is that they were married but no record of their marriage has not survived.