Sources Researched for the Neil Family History

Using the Sources

The links to the original sources, collected by type or all together chronologically can be accessed using the drop down menu at the top of the page or the links at the bottom of this page.

A Note on the Sources

The sources used in the narrative are Church records, Old Parochial Registers and Census Returns as well as some newspapers, letters etc. Over the years and in the course of writing the story of the Neil family the means of accessing the various source documents has changed enormously.

In the early years of researching I relied quite heavily on the International Genealogical Index; an index of the births, baptisms and banns collated from the Old Parish Registers (OPR) This was created by the staff of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon Church) for their own religious reasons to do with family history but their Old Parish Registers (OPR) indexing programme was, at one time, one of the few ways that indexes to the records could be consulted at a distance. In my case it became possible to go to a local Mormon library and use their facilities to search in these indexes. If, like me, you were researching Scottish ancestry from England this was a great boon.

Their indexes went on to include other kinds of records including information from their own church members who could add data to the indexes. This led to a more ambiguous data set but was still, at the time, a key resource. It's records were published as microfiche or microfilm and this eventually, at least partially, removed the need to consult the indexes to the records in paper form. In due course they added census information as well and they eventually made many of these records, including the entire 1881 census, available for purchase at a very low cost. I still have some microfilm and microfiche from this era and they can still be useful. The Church of Latter Day Saints progressed from this and eventually their datasets could be examined via home computer via their Familysearch.org web site

Since those days record offices have themselves developed indexes to OPRs and also the Statutory Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths (BMDs) and many of the Censuses as well as adding further resources to their collections which are now all held in databases. These databases are generally accessed via web sites created, sometimes, by private businesses who licence the data and charge for access. These sorts of family history web sites include "Find My Past" and "Ancestry.com" etc. Of particular use to me has been "Scotland's People" but I have also used used other web sites extensively.

With the increase in ease of access to the records - or at least the indexes to them - family history grew in popularity and with that the family history societies also grew in numbers and scope and started to assemble more of the indexes that they historically had done for a long time. Now these records were not just indexes to gravestonhes but became very diverse and in Scotland even some of the poor Law records have now been indexed. In my own research I have historically used the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society who used to have their own library at Clayton House in Piccadilly in Manchester and who have now operate from the newly refurbished Manchester Central Reference Library where they have a very impressive set-up. The Glasgow & West of Scotland Family History Society have also been extremely helpful and in particular the current membership secretary, Mrs Elizabeth D Smith, has been a great help to me in my researches.

Format of the Sources

The evidence for the narrative I have developed in this web site is in various formats. In the earlier stages of my research I used the IGI indexes and derived lists of possible ancestors that were then stores as either images or as spreadsheet files. At this period I also obtained paper copies of the records as "extracts" which are either a written copy made by the record office staff at the time of application for the copy or, sometimes, as a photocopy a section of the original record that covered the query only and this was inserted into a modern form template. On this web site I have scanned these documents though I obviously retain the originals.

As computerisation of the sources developed and access to indexes - and actual photographed pages of the original register the index entry refers to - became possible through computer databases, the format of these sources changed. Initial searches on web sites produced "working copies" of lists that I used to find possible ancestors. Sometimes these were easily saved as jpeg image files and at other times the course of the enquiry demanded that several bits of sources were kept together. In this case sometimes I have kept these clips and some accompanying text together by pasting them all into a word processor document, usually Microsoft Word but also sometimes as spreadsheets or plain text files.

A lot of the tables in this web site were generated by inserting .csv files of the data to avoid mistakes in retyping. These are in a sense a duplication of the source but are needed to furnish the web page. Similarly I have tried to keep the size of the web page load down by using lower quality "clips" of the original file. In all cases these can be clicked on in the web page to open a new higher quality image in a new web page.

When I first started out on my family research I commissioned a number of "reports" on my ancestry from the Scots Ancestry Research Society and these were my starting point. there are links to these as well.

To make it easier to follow the story I have put direct links to graphic files of the major lines of the family tree described here. These are in either in .jpeg format or as PDF files. These were generated using Legacy V7.5 for Windows which is the software that I use to keep my genealogical records. These can be accessed from the drop down menu or links on the pages.

As a result of this there are a large number of files used to build this web site and these can be found in their totality here. However, it will probably be of more use for most people not concerned with how the web site is constructed or the pages furnished to have ready access to the source documents only and these can be found below under the type of record they are and the start of the list for each type of document can be accessed from the drop down menu or links on the pages.