Nelson Denton wrote: > Many people belonged to other Christian groups other than the main churches > Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic. Not in Scotland, they didn't. There were local concentrations of Roman Catholic and Episcopal congregations ("Anglican" is a later label), but in Scotland, the majority of people belonged to churches which would be best described as "Presbyterian", even if they were separate from the Kirk of Scotland. There were, from early in the 18th century, successive waves of secession from the Kirk of Scotland - and then secessions from the secessions - but the differences between all these splinter groups were often more apparent than real, and most of these churches had beliefs and organisational structures very similar to those of the Kirk of Scotland. > These Dissenters, Non-Conformists, Quakers, Dunkers, Anabaptists, > Mennonites, Amish, Puritans, Brethren You are confusing categories here. "Dissenters" and "Non-Conformists" mean pretty well the same thing, and are simply labels for those who did not belong to the Estabished Church - they say nothing about the beliefs or organisations of those who dissented or failed to conform. And while "Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonites etc" are the names of specific groups with recognisable beliefs, their incidence, in Scotland, varies between "rare" and "unkown". > etc often held views that every man > should tell the truth at all times and that God Knows All. So therefore such > things as taking oaths, signing legal documents and perfoming fancy > ceremonies like church weddings was unneccessary. They were were often very > outspoken of their hatred towards the mainsteam churches and would never > even enter one. All that sounds like a rather broad generalisation, in view of the wide differences in belief which existed between various of the sects you mention. And reading the rest of your post, it strikes me that, while the circumstances you describe may well have occurred in North America, they really did not apply in Scotland. > So many of these people although they attended "Church" > faithfully didn't go to those who recorded marriages etc. Civil or simple > private home marriages were the only alternative for these people. Mixed > marriages (Catholic-Protestant-Jewish-etc) or divorced couples were of > course shunned by the Church Again, wide of the mark for Scotland, where (a) there were very few Jews, other than in the major cities, and not many there and (b) no realistic possibility of divorce for anyone other than the very wealthy. And while the Kirk of Scotland might thunder against "Papists" or Non-Conformists, it did not go in for "shunning" non-members - you will find numerous cases, in the Registers of the kirk of Scotland, where the marriages of these same "Papists" or "Dissenters" are recorded. > and had little choice but to go for a civil/common-law marriage There was no such thing as a "civil marriage" in Scotland until 1940, and as Scotland has always retained its own distinctive legal system, based on Roman Law, rather than the "Common Law" which forms the basis of the English and North American legal systems, there was no such thing as a "common-law marriage" either. There were forms of marriage described as "irregular", but while these were frowned upon by the Kirk of Scotland, they were perfectly valid under the Law of Scotland. Gavin Bell