jecroft@att.net wrote: >Jean, > >As the rest of James & Georgina's children are registered with the Church of Scotland, it is doubtful that they were Free Church members. It is much more likely that the record was not made (illness/forgetfulness of recorder) ... > The fault did not necessarily lie with the keeper of the Register - there was a theoretical obligation on parents to register, but there was no mechanism for enforcing it (unlike the situation from 1855, from which date failure to report births, deaths or marriages to the civil Registrar was punishable by a fine). There were many reasons why parents might not register a child's baptism, not least the fact that a fee was normally payable to the Session Clerk for recording it. >or the record is illegible (handwriting/deterioration of ink). > > That is unlikely to be a significant problem for mid-19th century baptisms. The style of handwriting is not too far from today's, and even if the clerk wrote inelegantly, looking at surrounding records in the same hand, together with reasonable background knowledge of the terminology used and the local names, both place and personal, will generally give sufficient clues to allow difficult entries to be deciphered. I think the original query concerned "missing" baptisms in a range of parishes along the Moray coast? One reason for baptisms slipping between the cracks in this part of the country could be the relatively large number of "chapels of ease". The typical parish had a single kirk which the whole population attended, and would consequently be under the eye of the Minister. But in extensive and populous parishes like Fordyce and Rathven, there were numerous subsidiary kirks, to cater for parts of the parish more remote from the parish kirk, but these did not keep their own registers unless and until they were declared to be "quoad sacra" parishes in their own right. So if a harrassed new father could not be bothered to take the time to traipse over to what might have been an unfamiliar "official" parish kirk to register his new child, who can blame him? Gavin Bell