Old School Rolls

[robertalan]

Does anyoneone know if there is a record of students and their teachers of any schools in Dumbartonshire from the 1700s and 1800s. My ancestor James Arrol was a schoolmaster at Rhu in 1760.

[barryd]

I have seen Admission Registers - names of children registering for school with parental details and addresses etc., and Log Books which are more like a diary of the day-to-day activities at the school which often give the teachers names at the beginning and it names them if they are sick and do not come to work that day. Only in England have I seen them and only in the later part of Queen Victoria's reign and after her death into the 1920's. In other words when schools became the responsibility of local government.

[GR2]

At that time the kirk and local heritors appointed the parish schoolmaster. To supplement his salary, he was normally also appointed session clerk and was sometimes also the precentor. You could look for him in the on-line catalogue of the National Archives of Scotland, but the main place you might find information about him is in the minutes of the kirk session for the parish. There might be a date of appointment, perhaps details of salary, testimonials, details of when he was replaced ... The session minutes and the registers of baptisms and marriages for the parish will be in his handwriting during his period of office. I have never seen any roll of scholars for this period, but if anything like that survives, it will be in the records of the parish kirk.

As he would be a graduate, it is worth checking the lists of graduates published for the various Scottish universities.