Sharon wrote: > When did Banffshire move to Moray? Banffshire has long been something of a Cinderella among counties, always in danger of being swallowed by its bigger neighbours. In ecclesiastical terms, the county never really existed. The Kirk of Scotland divided the country up into administrative districts called Synods (being a gouping of Presbyteries, which in turn were a grouping of Parishes), and while they had different boundaries from the counties, these did broadly coincide. So Aberdeenshire covered much of the same ground as the Synod of Aberdeen, and the county of Angus largely coincided with the Synod of Angus and Mearns. But Banffshire never made it to Synod status, being divided between the Synods of Moray and Aberdeen. As a civil county (for the administration of justice, and other purposes connected with the Crown), Banffshire did exist for a number of centuries, but with very untidy boundaries: until 1891, when there was a grand tidy-up, some parishes were in more than one county, and some parts of the county actually existed as islands within other counties. I have documented these oddities, and their likely implications for genealogy, on the Banffshire pages of GENUKI (www.abdn.net/genuki/BAN). More recently, Banffshire has, along with all Scottish counties, been subject to two major reorganisations: in 1974, the old counties were replaced by a system of "Regions". Banffshire (together with Aberdeenshire, Kincardine, Moray and the City of Aberdeen) was absorbed into Grampian Region. 20 years later, the doctine of "Big is Beautiful" had gone out of fashion, and the Regions were split up again. However, we did not go back to where we were before. Instead, the territory of Grampian Region was split into 3: Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray, but "Aberdeenshire" now includes all of Kincardine, and the eastern half of Banffshire. Similarly, "Moray" has absorbed the western parts of Banffshire. As a result of all these changes, finding the archives which might contain information on one's ancestors is, to say the least, complicated. Gavin Bell