If you are looking to find the place where your ancestors lived in Scotland, there are a few pitfalls to beware of.
The main problem is that many (even most) place names are not unique. There are, for instance, a croft named Edinburgh near Elgin, a farm named Dundee near Huntly, and at least two Irelands in Scotland. When you start getting into really common place names or elements of place names, like Burnside or Boghead or Kirkto(w)n, you are heading for a minefield.
Names can also apply to a single house or farm, and these are not marked on the sort of map you might use for driving around, either on paper or as a satnav.
For example, I was once asked about a family who lived at Hillockhead. The person asking had looked on a road map and found a place called Hillockhead on the Black Isle
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NH7460 and since this was the only one they had found, assumed it was the one where their family had lived.
The trouble was that the records of the family were from the parish register of Rothes, which (in 19th century terms, when the only way to get about on land was by muscle power) is nowhere near the Black Isle.
On checking the first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map
http://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch/index.html on the National Library of Scotland web site, there it was, a couple of miles south of the town of Rothes
http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16&lat=57.5069&lon=-3.2024&layers=5&b=1These days, there is nothing left of this Hillockhead except some unevenness of the ground in the middle of a field
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3558550There are other Hillockheads too
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3026353http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1108338http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4626407http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2081933and that's only a selection of the ones within a few tens of miles of Rothes.
The second problem is that place names are not constant; they can change over time.
For example, the fam called Muiryhillock on the first edition six-inch map
http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16&lat=56.7151&lon=-2.7869&layers=5&b=1 is now named Easter Marcus on the modern maps
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NO5158.
Generally, if a farm has a name like Overton, Upperton, Middleton, Netherton, Easterton, Westerton, Mains of x and a whole range of other elements, its original full name is likely to incorporate another name, which you will need to know to be sure of getting the right place.
Here's an example from Memsie
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NJ9661 - you can see that on the modern map there are Muirton of Memsie and Westerton of Memsie, plus Overtown, Memsie House and Manor Farm. Then look at the old map
http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16&lat=57.6465&lon=-2.0546&layers=5&b=1 and it's Overtown
of Memsie, and Manor farm is marked as Home Farm. If you move the old map to the right you'll find there's also a Woodside of Memsie that isn't named on the modern maps at all, though it's definitely still there.
There are hundreds of example of such changes.
The critical point is that if you have found a reference to your ancestors in a census or in a parish register or registration district,
knowing the parish or district name is absolutely essential for finding the place. If you are asking for help to find it, you really must say where you found the reference to the place you are looking for.
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Topic: Finding places in Scotland (Read 6636 times)