Joan Fraser wrote: > Would you please tell me how I might go about looking for an > irregular marriage for these two? Thank you very much for any help > at all. Have you checked the Church of Scotland kirk session minutes for the parish(es) where their eldest children were probably born/baptised? If the couple were married irregularly then normally they would have been summoned in by the local kirk session and interrogated. This information - including where/when they said they were married - is typically only recorded in the kirk session minutes which are quite separate from the registers of marriages etc. Kirk session minutes are held in the National Archives of Scotland (http://www.nas.gov.uk) (next door to General Register Office for Scotland which holds the pre-1855 parish registers) and given your distance you'd probably need a researcher in Edinburgh to check them for you. Such a search is only generally feasible if you can narrow down the likely parishes very precisely and also the date when the couple probably married, based on children's births. Good luck. Viv Dunstan