Linlithgowshire Associate Congregation Baptisms

West Lothian did not escape the religious political divisions over the rights to appoint a parish Church Minister. This eventually led to some parishioners leaving their parish churches, and meeting in fields and farms as congregations of dissenters. From 1738 their first baptisms were recorded, and a church was constructed soon after in the hills between Linlithgow and Bathgate. These previously undisclosed records have been transcribed and are now available to view via a CD that can be purchased from WLFHS.

Below, we describe the capabilities of the program we have developed for viewing the records.

On launching the viewer, you will be presented with this screen:

 
The layout of the screen should be instantly recognisable to anyone who has used some of our other viewers – search parameters to the right of the screen, the first (or selected) record matching those search criteria at the left of the screen, and all matching records in a scroll-able list at the bottom.

The search fields are:

Surname

The surname as it would normally be spelt today. The decision to record names in this fashion was made because of the variation in the original records: baptisms for children of what were clearly the same parents had different spellings of the names. Sometimes this even extended to spellings within the same record. For example, we have indexed this record (truncated for display purposes) under a surname of Crawford:

“John Crawfoord and Alison Binny had a …… the Childs Name is Robert Crawford”

Note the difference in the way the Father’s and Child’s surname were recorded!

Child’s Name

The name of the child. As for surname, there has been a degree of standardisation applied here, although mostly it is limited to writing the name out in full. For example a number of the records have the child’s name written as ‘Tho’, which is clearly an abbreviation of Thomas.

Other Text

This allows you to search for any word that might appear in a baptism record, excluding about 150 common English words, e.g. ‘we’, way’, ‘son’, ‘seven’ etc., that do not greatly assist in finding records.

Baptism Year

The ‘From’ and ‘To’ baptism year field can be used to limit the search to a specific date range. The year must be in the range 1738 to 1863 as these are the dates of the first and last recorded baptisms, respectively.

Baptism Place

The place where the baptism was recorded. These are grouped by the nearest modern-day town or village, and can be searched at that level (e.g. ‘Bathgate’), or more specifically (e.g. ‘Tartraven, Linlithgow’).

Search Using

The search algorithm which applies to the Surname, Child’s Name and Other Text fields. Exact Match means a record will only be found if there is an index entry for the data exactly as it was keyed (but discounting differences in case, e.g ‘SMITH’ and ‘smiTH’ yield the same results). A ‘Wildcards Allowed‘ search will accept wild-card characters. Finally ‘Sounds Like‘ does a phonetic match. Essentially, the search terms entered are converted to a string of letters representing the way the word may be pronounced, and this is then compared against values that have been pre-calculated for all words in the baptism text (excluding the 150 so common words referred to above) to see if there any matches. If that sounds complicated, the easiest way to see how this works in practice is to try it!

Clicking the Search button will perform a search using the parameters that have been entered – you must specify one, even if it is only a place or date. Search terms are ANDed together i.e. both must apply to any given record before it will be considered a match.

Pressing the Clear button will reset all the fields to their default values, just as if you had restarted the viewer.

Perhaps the best way to see how the searcing works is to give a few examples. First, let’s try a search by surname (only), by entering ‘meikle’ in the Surname box and pressing the Search button.

If this is the first search since launching the viewer, there will be a short delay whilst the database is loaded – note the message in the bottom-left of the screen advising that this is what is happening:
 

 

The results of our search will then be displayed:

Initially, the first record matching the search results will be shown in full in the Current Record Detail area. You can display another record from the result set by clicking on it in the summary box (bottom of screen).

If you have a rough idea of the date a baptism might have taken place, you can add in a From or To date. Here, we modify the existing search to only show baptisms for the surname ‘meikle’ which took place before the end of 1765 (again, pressing ‘Search‘ once we’ve entered all the search terms we want):

 
The viewer allows searching for names that sound similar. We can see how this works by modifying the search by changing the Search Using drop-down to Sounds Like and pressing the Search button again. Here are the updated results:
 

 
We can now see that there are records for ‘Muckle’, ‘Meickle’, ‘Miekle’ and ‘Mickle’, as well as Meikle’, all of which are possible variations of the name we originally searched for.
 
If a name isn’t known, then it is possible to search without one, although you would need to have a rough idea of the place or date(s) of interest since the viewer will only return a maximum of 400 results for any one search.
 
If you want to keep a copy of a baptism for your records, it is possible to do so by saving it to PDF and then printing the resultant file from your favourite PDF viewer. To do this, just choose ‘Save as PDF…’ from the Baptism Viewer’s file menu. A standard file browser will open and you can either save in to the default directory or browse to somewhere else of your choosing. The filename will default to e.g. BaptismExtract-0256.pdf but you can also change that if you wish. Just remember where you put it and what you called it!
 
Once saved, you can open the file in your preferred PDF viewer. If you have none installed, there are a range of free applications with built in PDF support. Apart from the usual suspect, these include LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox, Foxit Reader and others.

An example of what such an extract might look like is shown below: