This item was published during the term of a previous administration that ended in April 2007
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150th anniversary of civil registration system
07/08/2004
The Act introducing the registration of births, deaths
and marriages in Scotland was approved by Parliament 150
years ago today.
The Act introducing the registration of births, deaths
and marriages in Scotland was approved by Parliament 150
years ago today. The Act paved the way for the system which
continues today. Scotland was later than most of Europe,
and 18 years behind England, in setting up civil
registration.
The Registrar General for Scotland, Duncan Macniven, is
responsible for registration of births, deaths and
marriages. He commented:
Social change, especially the growth of the big cities
after the Industrial Revolution, swamped the old system of
parish registration. But, although civil registration
began in England in 1837, the change faced a lot of
opposition in Scotland.
The main problem was with the traditional practice of
irregular marriages - carried out, for example, by the
blacksmith at Gretna Green - which would have been swept
away by the new system. As a compromise, the Government
dropped the marriage proposals and irregular marriages
continued to be legal - for a while. Finally, the 1854 Act
gave the go-ahead for civil registration, which has lasted
150 years.
From 1551, Scotland was supposed to have a register of
baptisms and marriages (and later burials) kept by the
parish churches. But, by the end of the 18th Century, the
system was breaking down. But if it was a fondness for
irregular marriage that held back official registration, it
may have been a fondness for the bottle that undermined
this first attempt to map the demography of Scotland. As a
history of Edinburgh published in 1779 notes:
"The register of burials is kept by people whose
faculties are impaired by drinking, who forget today what
was done yesterday …….….. they enter not into the list of
burials any who have died without receiving baptisms; nor
those whose relations are so poor as not to be able to pay
for the use of a mortcloth; nor those who die in the
charity workhouse. …. As for the register of births, it
does not deserve the name. True it is, a list is kept in
the south side of St Giles' Church, where any person who
choose to go with a piece of money, will get the name and
birth of a child inserted."
But no attention is paid to the observation of this
practice, either by the clergy or by parents.
By 1801 the Census found that, out of the 850 parishes
in Scotland, not more than 99 had regular registers, the
rest having only occasional entries or no register
whatever. Some registers were accidentally destroyed. At
Penpont in Dumfriesshire a fire which happened in the manse
during the ministry of Mr Murray, consumed the parochial
records prior to the year 1728, while the register for
Abertarff in Inverness-shire was lost in the act of
crossing a rapid stream.
Although a bill for Scottish registration came before
Parliament in 1835, and several others were presented in
subsequent years, they were all thrown out.
The Bills were supported by the medical profession, who
realised that improvements in public health depended on
knowing death rates and causes of deaths. The insurance
companies liked the proposal because profitable life
insurance business relied on good information about life
expectancy.
The legal profession was very keen, because inheriting
property can sometimes be difficult without a birth
certificate or proof that parents were married. With so
many young babies dying, and no death certificates, many
people also worried about the danger of unwanted infants
being murdered.
In the other camp were people worried about the expense
of registration. Poor people could not be forced to pay
for registering unavoidable events like births or deaths
and the parishes objected to taking on the cost. In the
end, a government grant was agreed.
There was also a great dispute about who should keep the
new registers. The session clerks and school teachers, who
kept the old registers, petitioned against the change
because they would lose income from registration fees. So
the existing session clerks were appointed as registrars
for the rest of their lives.
But the main problem remained marriage. In 1847, the
Scotsman said that: Everybody knows that, by the law of
Scotland, the marriage ceremony can be performed with as
perfect legal effect by a blacksmith as by a clergyman.
And the government wanted to end the Scottish practice
of regarding a couple as married if they stated as much in
front of witnesses. So Scottish Registration Bills were
accompanied by Bills to reform the law of marriage. But
this was opposed by the Church of Scotland, concerned that
the new civil weddings would discourage people from getting
married in church.
In the end, the government dropped the marriage
proposals, the session clerks were paid to be registrars,
and the Treasury met the cost of the new system. That
allowed the bill to be passed by Parliament and approved by
Queen Victoria on August 7 1854. The new system of civil
registration started on January 1 1855.