Hi Nancy, Welcome to the Wigtownshire mailing list. Its not unusual to be unable to find marriage or birth/baptism records in Scotland prior to 1855. From 1855 onwards, compulsory civil registration of BDMs were mostly adhered to, but prior to that, one has to rely on other incomplete records. The best chance is the Old Parochial Registers (OPRs), being the marriage and baptism registers which were kept by the Church of Scotland. Membership of that Church was not universal, and even for families who were members, the records were not well kept in all parishes. Some that were kept have since been lost or damaged by the elements. Sometimes one is lucky enough to find monumental inscriptions (MIs) which include valuable information on one's ancestors. If you haven't already sought that source, you may want to explore what the Dumfries and Galloway Family History Society has to offer.They have several booklets covering graveyards in Wigtownshire. Check out the publications from the website: http://www.dgfhs.org.uk/ You may have missed finding a couple of William and Janet's children in the 1851 census if you relied on Ancestry.com alone. Their search engine is good, but alas, their transcriptions have lots of errors, and that sometimes makes it difficult to find people. FreeCEN has much less coverage, and the search engine not as flexible, but better quality control on the transcriptions: http://www.freecen.org.uk/cgi/search.pl I found this on FreeCEN, which I've reduced a little to hopefully fit the Rootsweb page size, but sometimes the reformatting distorts such tables: 1851 Census Piece: SCT1851/891 Place: Leswalt -Wigtownshire Enumeration District: 6 Civil Parish: Leswalt Ecclesiastical Parish, Village or Island: Leswalt Stranraer Pb Folio: 877 Page: 3 Schedule: 10 Address: Sun Street, Stranraer Surname First name(s) Rel Status Sex Age Occupation Where Born MILRIGHT Jess Head U F 30 Sewer Wigtownshire - Leswalt WYATT Elizth Hlfsis U F 23 Dressmaker Wigtownshire - Leswalt WYATT Wm Hlfbro U M 14 Scholar Wigtownshire - Leswalt BROUGH Isabella Visitr U F 28 Dressmaker Wigtownshire - Wigtown BROUGH Robt Visitr U M 20 Printer Apprentice Wigtownshire - Wigtown Although there are other possible scenarios, this does fit with Jane/Janet BROWN having died prior to this census. It looks like she had been married, or at least had a child, Jess MIL(W)RIGHT, prior to marrying William WYATT. (Hlfsi and Hlfbro being abbreviations for half-sister and half-brother.) Its also interesting to see that Robert BROUGH was in this household. I presume that he was the one that Elizabeth WYATT married on 24 Nov 1851. I also see from the IGI that their daughter Jane Brown BROUGH, baptised 10 Jul 1852, appears to have been named after her maternal grandmother. Hope this is of some help. The John WYATT you say was born 1823 would have been 17 or 18 in 1841. If he was recorded in the 1841 census, and the enumerator followed instructions, his age should have been given as 15. You stated 12, so I wonder if one of those numbers was a typo? Regards, Bruce