Clariman wrote:I am using the Scotlands People website to search for some children of an ancestor that died young. Because they never appeared on census records, I don't know their names. It would seem that searching for births by listing parents names would be a perfectly obvious search to be able to do, but I cannot find a way of doing it on Scotlands People. DAK know how to do it?
Do Ancestry and Findmypast have Scottish early 20th century birth records? I suspect they don't because I cannot find a birth where I know the child's name.
Hi Clariman
How are you getting on with your searching. I have done many searches for children that were born and died between censuses in Scotland. I have the added difficulty of three spellings of the surname - however the area of registration is usually confined to a county - then a district or two within this.
What I do is, if I know from the 1911 census that there are three children unaccounted for, I look at the list of children I know of and then see when a child could have been born and how old they would have been at the next census.
I enter the surname in Scotlands People , no need to tick female or make, - I look up the county that the family stayed in hopefully down to the district - I look each year in turn if more than a one year space, noting any possible names. Sometimes, if the family moved I have the county but have to enter two or three different districts - trial and error- but births and deaths of others along with census entries usually narrows the field. Then I have a list of' 'possibles'.
I then go to deaths and try out one by one the names of the listed children within the time frame - so Ann Smith between 1905 and 1911 with the registration districts as above - then a list follows and I can work out from the ages of those who died- if they fit. So an Ann Smith born in 1907 and and Ann Smith who died aged 3 in 1910 both entries of the same district is likely to be the same child. Strangely if I put too much info I can up end up with less.
Some names are obviously not family whilst others just as obviously are- you know when you see them but if 3 Ann Smiths fit the bill - I put it down into my book for my next visit to the archives to confirm. I have kept ScotlandsPeople afloat over the years before I got this down to a fine art that works for me.