My GGGrandfather and his 2nd wife gravestone is there namely, Alexander McGrigor died in 1864 Eliza Younie died 1886. The registrars records don't go back that far
The registrars had no input to the burial records in the late 19th century unless the same person just happened to be both Registrar and clerk to the cemeteries department. In the case of Aberlour, I think the burial records would originally have been created by the kirk, and latterly by Aberlour Town Council's staff. After 1975 when all the little Town Councils were abolished, the surviving cemetery records passed into the care of Moray District Council, now Moray Council, and they are kept in the registrars' offices. That is the only involvement the registrars have with 19th century burial records.
Moray District Council also had all the surviving burial registers in its care microfilmed some time around 1980-ish, and these microfilms are held in the Moray Local Heritage Centre in Elgin. You should try asking the Local Heritage Centre if the Aberlour burial records for the second half of the 19th century have survived. (IIRC they have not, but I could easily be wrong.)
they told me also that if a name is not recognised as a Scottish name they change it to Young.
Younie is not a rare name in Moray/Banffshire* (there are 466 Younie references in LIBINDX, compared to 1759 Young references), so there would have been no call to change it, even if that were common practice, which is not true. The idea that anyone in Banffshire would arbitrarily change someone's name from Younie to Young is extraordinary.
*G F Black's
The Surnames of Scotland says that Younie/Yunie/Yunnie is an old Moray surname, and cites references to it from the 17th century. There are births of Younies registered in Aberlour from 1863 to 1893, so there was clearly at least one family of that name there, and the registrar would have been familiar with the name.
AL800 is not the correct reference for the headstone. The abbreviation for Aberlour in the LIBINDX system is Ab, and swearching in LIBINDX for Ab800 brings up two references: NM114008 Alexander McGrigor and NM115522 Elizabeth McGrigor née Younie (NB not Young).
Bear in mind also that the headstone references in LIBINDX have nothing to do with any burial references that may or may not exist. The headstone references were created by a team, taken on by Moray District Council under a government job creation scheme, who went round every known burial ground in Moray (the post-1975 version of Moray, not the historic county of Moray), made a map of every one, assigned numbers to the stones they found, recorded every legible inscription and typed an index card for every stone, in 1978-1979. These cards became the basis of LIBINDX in the 1980s. It is known that they do contain some errors, but as LIBINDX has the correct information, it would appear that the inscription on the stone to which the reference Ab800 was assigned is correct.
As for Alexander McGrigor's first wife, if (as seems likely) the burial records from the 1850s have not survived, you may never learn where she is buried.
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Topic: Aberlour Cemeyeries (Read 727 times)