Marriage records in the Old Parish Registers are, generally speaking, not necessarily the record of the date of the wedding ceremony, but the date on which the proclamations of banns were completed, though some OPRs do also state the date of the wedding ceremony.
There are a couple of possibilities for a wedding date.
One is to have a look in the newspapers of the time. However it's only a small minority of the populace who would have put announcements in the papers.
Another is that it may have been in a family bible. To verify this you would need to look at all the online genealogies to find out which one doesn't quote any of the others as the source of the information. The reason for this is that people just copy whole chunks of family trees they find online without checking the original sources, so before you know it you have 50 or 100 trees all with the same information. So you need to find out which is the one from which all the others were copied. Not an easy task, I fear.
As for the death, it is very unlikely that an 1849 death record will give the names of the deceased person's parents. An 1830 marriage might mention the name of the bride's father, and/or very occasionally the groom's father, but the names of their mothers are almost never included.
There are several ways of finding an original death record before 1849
- The Old Parish Registers at Scotland's People. However these are very incomplete in coverage. You can look up which parish registers contain death records - see
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/guides/old-parish-registers/list-of-old-parish-registers - but I see that Kelso has just three deaths on record, all in 1839.
- The Kirk Session accounts sometimes contain records of cash received for the hire of a mortcloth. This was a cloth that was used to cover the coffin during the funeral service. Most parishes had at least one mortcloth which could be hired, and the proceeds went into the poors fund. You find the KS records on
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. The volume of accounts of Kelso KS 1814-1855 is extant and available.
- Gravestones. I do not know what is available in the way of gravestones from Kelso but I'm sure someone else will.
- Newspapers. Same comments as above.
- Family bible. Same comments as above.
- Sasines. These are the records of change of ownership of land. They're not online. You have to go to the National Records of Scotland for these. Or hire a searcher or get someone to go on your behalf.
- National Records of Scotland and other archives. There are catalogues at
https://catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk/ - whether there are documents relating to your man depends partly on his situation in life, and whether he had to do with the agencies that generate records. Again, these items are rarely online.
Never trust
anything you find on Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Geni or 1001 other web sites out there unless it's an image of an original document.
The vast majority of original Scottish documents that are available online are at Scotland's People.
And if these are the actual marriage entries, am I wasting my time looking for further clarification if Scottish records don't include details of the couple's parents as English parish records do?
Quite possibly.
