Karen wrote: > In your estimate, what % of people registered births/marriages with > the parish? 100%, 90%, 50%? Nobody knows. It's a bit like saying "be sure and let me know if you don't get this letter". But there are just two many complaints in the records that "the registers have been imperfectly kept" or "persons are not registering the baptisms of their children" for us to believe that the OPRs are ever anything but fragmentary. > Did only pious church-going folk do it or was everyone pious and > church going in rural Scotland? I don't think piety had much to do with it. I suspect that, in many cases, neither the congregation nor the minister really saw much point to the exercise. In a small community, everyone knew who had married whom, and who had a child baptised last year. > Also, if you were from Botriphnie but married a woman in a neighboring > parish, would you most likely be registered in the parish of the > bride? In such cases, it was quite common to register a marriage in both parishes - if you were "into" registering at all, that is. > I have looked at all the Innes from the Botriphnie parish records but > at a certain point it becomes a guessing game as to who are David > Innes' (b. 1783) parents. There were 3 generations of David's in my > line, stopping with him. [He married Jean MacWilliam (b. abt 1787).] That's what happens to us all, I'm afraid. We often hear of "brick walls" preventing further genealogical progress, but in my experience, the more usual end of the story is a multiplicty of people with the right name and of approximately the right age, and no way of telling which one might be "ours". Have you investigated the Kirk Session records? There are Minutes covering 1729-1833 (with possible gaps) and Accounts for 1774-1829. These sometimes include a note of payments for reading the proclamations of marriage, or fines for Fornication, and can sometimes fill in gaps in the record. Gavin Bell