> Yes - remember that the parish registers do not cover every birth. Your > Mungo may have been born in Roxburghshire (or somewhere else nearby) but > his birth not recorded in surviving records. It's probably not an appealing > thought because it does raise the possibility of family lines being very > difficult (if not impossible) to trace, but it seems to have affected a > fairly hefty proportion of births in southern Scotland in that period. > Indeed, it's amazing that any church records survived! In addition, anyone subscribing to one of the non-conformist denominations will not appear as their records are in the NAS (formerly SRO) where they survive. As far as I know, they're not yet indexed (when I went to look for an ancestor, I was handed an old exercise book - the original register!). Depending on when the family converted, it can mean that half the kids turn up in the OPR, and the other half not. The Borders were a hot bed of dissent - the Minister for Whitsome complained in his (1790s) Statistical Account entry that about a third of the folk in his parish were Free Church members, and there's no reason to think that Whitsome was better or worse than any other parish Lesley Robertson ******************************************************************** Dr Lesley A. Robertson CBiol FIBiol Kluyver Laboratory for Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, Julianalaan 67, 2628BC, Delft,The Netherlands tel 31 15 2782421; fax 31 15 2782355; email L.A.Robertson@stm.tudelft.nl.