Hello,
1855 was the year when a national BMD system was put into place across Scotland. For deaths before that , please refer to the link below.
Good luck with your search. Regards, Steve :O)
www.gro-scotland.scotland.gov.uk"Births, deaths and marriages before 1855
If you have been lucky enough to get back beyond the year 1855, and have not come to a dead end during your search of the Scottish statutory registers - which may happen if, for example, your ancestors came to Scotland from Ireland - then the old parish registers (OPRs) may take you further back beyond this date. Many of these registers are available in the GROS, where those that survived were deposited under the Registration Act of 1854 to form a splendid continuity with the statutory registers.
The OPRs are the registers of the established Church, the Church of Scotland, which record births and baptisms; proclamations of banns or marriages; and deaths or burials, up to 1854. The parish ministers or session clerks of some 900 parishes kept these registers until their formal transfer to the GROS. The surviving registers number approximately 3,500 but they are far from complete. Though the oldest register relates to baptisms and banns in 1553 for the parish of Errol in Perthshire, for some parishes the earliest registers date from the early 19th century, while for others there may be no registers at all. A lot of parishes do not have any burial or death registers. The standard of record-keeping varied considerably from parish to parish and from year to year, and most entries contain relatively little information by comparison to the statutory registers.
You should therefore set out with optimism tinged with realism when tackling the OPRs. Remember also that although registration in the Church of Scotland's registers was in theory compulsory for all denominations, it was both costly and unpopular. Members of other churches, such as the Free Church of Scotland or Roman Catholic Church, may not be recorded, though with luck you may be able to find some. Also, as populations shifted and cities started to develop in the 19th century, religion began to lose its hold, and as few as 30% of events may be recorded for certain urban parishes.
There are no hard and fast rules about the details given in the OPR pages themselves. These vary from parish to parish, and the information can be very thin. In the case of baptisms, aside from the name of the child and the date of the baptism, you might hope to obtain the names of both parents, their place or parish of residence, and perhaps the occupation of the father. On some occasions a list of witnesses may be supplied. For marriages, you might expect to find the date on which the marriage took place or was contracted, the names of the parties and their place or parishes of residence. If you are lucky enough to have an ancestor with a relatively uncommon surname, this can be useful when attempting to identify the correct entry from the indexes. Unfortunately, remote parishes such as those in the Highlands are notoriously difficult, with the same combinations of Christian names and surnames common to particular localities.These names may crop up again and again, for example, John Mackay; Kenneth Mackenzie; Mary Macdonald; Ann Ross; Margaret Fraser.
