Thanks to all who contacted me regarding my hard to read OPR image. Still working on it ! I have a bunch of family members in Langholm (Wilsons) known from family records, but the events in 1820s and 1830s are not on IGI or Scotlands People. I can find earlier ones and later ones. Any thoughts / sources ........ ? Jim Graham

Hi Jim, The birth/baptism records on Scotlandspeople for that period will be from the old parochial records (OPRs), which were the registers kept by the Church of Scotland. Many families were dissenters from the Church of Scotland, and as a result, lots of children went unrecorded in the OPRs. There are other reasons for missing records, such as missing pages, poor keeping of the register etc. By trawling through a parish register, it sometimes becomes apparent from handwriting changes, (or even signatures at the bottom of the pages), that the session clerk had changed. (Sometimes the minister himself kept the register.) Such changes were sometimes associated with a change in how well the register was kept. An exercise I sometimes try is tabulating the numbers of OPR birth/baptism records by year for a particular parish. One can do this simply by using the batch number search facility of the IGI. Its not entirely reliable due to extraction errors, but usually gives a good indication, and sometimes reveals some interesting patterns. Doing this for Langholm, I find that the average number per year for 1800-1809 was 21.9, for 1810-1819 was 20.5, for 1820-1829 was 15.7, for 1830-1839 was 23.7, and for 1840-1849 was 19.4. Short term variation from year to year was rather high, the range being from 10 to 31. There is a statistical method of analysis of such data, but without a knowledge of the interpretation of the results, this doesn't achieve much. It is, however, reasonable to say that the average for the period 1820-1829 is lower than one may expect. Without knowing the history of this parish, I cannot guess the particular reason, but perhaps it has something to do with your lack of expected WILSON records. The lower average in the period 1840-1849 may be due to the disruption associated with the formation of the Free Church, although there was no sudden drop off from 1843 when this Church was formed. Regards, Bruce On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:08 PM, Jim Graham <jim.r.graham@fsmail.net> wrote: > Thanks to all who contacted me regarding my hard to read OPR image.  Still working on it ! > I have a bunch of family members in Langholm (Wilsons) known from family records, but the events in 1820s and 1830s are not on IGI or Scotlands People.  I can find earlier ones and later ones. > Any thoughts / sources ........ ? > Jim Graham > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to DUMFRIES-GALLOWAY-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >