Ray Hennessy wrote: > 2009/11/27 Alison <royal.brooks@xtra.co.nz> wrote: > > Kathleen, I looked in vain for my 3xg grandmother, May Burgess, on the 1841 > >>census in Cromdale, using S.P. Used all name combinations but no luck . Had >>a brainwave and tried Freecen and there she was. Back to S.P. and tried >>searching for her neighbours also but not there. I wrote to S.P. but they >>replied saying that they do not do searches which was not what I was asking >>them to do at all. My credits for S.P. have expired so I have not done a >>search in the past month. The street (Main Street) cannot have been missed >>by the enumerator as Freecen have transcribed it. Have you tried Freecen? >> > > ____________________________________________________ > > Hi Alison > > When you go back onto ScP, try this out. There are three women on FreeCEN > called BURGESS who live in Moray and are aged 45 on the 1841 Census. These > are Elizabeth in Bellie, Jane in Elgin and your May in Cromdale-Inverness. > > On ScP for 1841 there are no May BURGESS entries aged 45 in the whole of > Scotland BUT there are three women aged 45 in Moray whose surname is > BURGESS. I also have credits expired and no need to access ScP at the > moment so I can't tell you what the names are. However one is in Bellie > [?Elizabeth], one is in Elgin [?Jane] and one is in **INVERALLAN** parish. There is a complication concerning the parish of Cromdale in terms of where its boundary lay, at different dates, and what County it belonged to, and this may have a bearing on how places in the parish are indexed by FreeCEN and ScotlandsPeople. Most of the boundary anomalies of parishes and counties were not resolved until the big shakeup of 1891, but for some reason, there was an Act of parliament in 1870 which changed the county boundaries between Inverness-shire and Elginshire (Moray). One of the parishes involved in this change was Cromdale. Unfortunately, the Act does not give any map of the changes, but only describes them in terms of some fairly abstruse landmarks, such as "the Muckrach or Findlarigg Burn" or the "Fuaranahanish Well". In 1891, there was a further change, whereby part of territory of the parish of Cromdale (Elginshire) was transferred to the parish of Duthil & Rothiemurchus, Inverness-shire. About 30 individual named places were involved. Historical records such as OPRs and Census tend to be catalogued and indexed in terms of what are sometimes called the "traditional" parish and county boundaries (ie those in force from 1891 to 1974) but as all Censuses up to and including 1891 were carried out in terms of the boundaries as they were when the particular Census was taken, certain discrepancies do arise. Gavin Bell