For over 150 years we’ve been spoiled by the marvellous accurate, detailed general maps of Scotland produced by the Ordnance Survey. Before that, many maps were produced perhaps for a wealthy landowner or for some specific purpose such as clarifying town and burgh boundaries.  They were often surveyed by a single surveyor with the minimum of assistance. On the one hand they are a unique record of a district at one moment in time, before the provision of central government-sponsored countrywide mapping. On the other hand, they can be hopelessly inaccurate, inconsistent and just plain misleading.

Thomas Kitchin for example was a prolific London-based, 18th century map maker who produced county maps for many parts of England and Scotland. However his map of Dumfriesshire which does in places show the smallest of villages fails to include larger places like Lockerbie and Thornhill. This basic error is typical when the map maker is somewhat distant from the surveying process and relies on others for survey information.

On the other hand, Matthew Stobie was an Edinburgh-based surveyor who was not known for producing many maps. But as well as a number of maps of parts of the Highlands though, he did produce an excellent detailed map of Roxburghshire over four sheets in 1770. Unlike many contemporary mapmakers, he attempts to map each and every house in the rural areas. This can be a real boon for family historians trying to work out exactly where their ancestors might have lived. A small part of his map showing the Jedburgh area is shown below – click on it to go to the full-size map. At this time others were able to avoid having to survey everything by using stylised representations of small groups of houses on a farm or in a hamlet which may not have represented the actual layout on the ground (cf. Crawford’s Map of Dumfriesshire, 1804)

For genealogists interested in any early 19th century Scottish burghs , John Wood produced a beautiful set of maps showing not just a detailed layout with all the street and close names, but often the names of all the property owners too.  Take a look at part of the John Wood map of the burgh of Selkirk dating from 1823 below.

 And best of all is that all of these resources can be accessed free of charge from the comfort of your own home. These and many other maps are available on the National Library of Scotland’s website at http://maps.nls.uk .  And one of the more recent innovations on the site is the availability of geo-referenced overlays – the ability to overlay a modern map on top of an old map to see what has changed over time. This is infinitely fascinating for those of us with a love of maps and you can easily spend hours comparing old and new.

The Scottish Borders are often portrayed as an area of ancient traditions and people strongly wedded to their local communities. And while this is essentially still true, it belies the fact that in Victorian times , the migration of people into the mill towns of Hawick, Galashiels and Selkirk was every bit as dramatic as that we associate with coal, iron , steel and shipbuilding areas like Clydeside and Tyneside.

In Hawick it all took off in the late 18th century when Baillie John Hardie introduced early framework knitting machines (see left) . The Border hills had always been a natural home for sheep and the rivers provided a source of power for the mills and the industry took off in a big way. It grew constantly over the next one hundred years across the main Border towns. The population of Hawick increased more than four fold during the 19th century.

The Censuses show us that people moved from all parts of the United Kingdom to live and work in Hawick during this time. In 1901 over 800 residents of Hawick had been born in England. Perhaps surprisingly there were less than 200 from Ireland. Over 1000 though came from Dumfries and Galloway and almost 600 from Edinburgh and the Lothians. In fact there were woollen industry workers there from every county in Scotland. Throw in watchmakers and butchers from Germany, some ice cream sellers from Italy and returning Colonials from Australia and Canada and there is a cosmopolitan mix in Hawick, Galashiels and Selkirk at that time.

And that’s one of the reasons that keeps things interesting with family history research in the Borders. It is not just about the Scotts , Turnbulls, Olivers and Laidlaws but about the diverse surnames from across the countries of Scotland, England and beyond. It could just as well feature Spreng, Gaylor, Virtue and Nardini, all established names in Hawick in 1901.

For anyone interested in the history of Kelso and its people we are very fortunate to have a unique set of records dating from the later 18th century.

The Kelso Dispensary was set up in 1777 by local landowner, the Honourable Mrs Baillie of Jerviswood as a charitable hospital and surgery for everyone in Kelso and the surrounding area, paid for entirely by voluntary subscription from some of the wealthier members of the community. It treated hundreds of local people every year and thankfully almost all of the patient records survive to the present day. They are deposited in the archives of the National Records of Scotland and a project to index them fully has been started (see scottishindexes.com).

The records detail exactly which parish each patient came from, their age, ailment and the result of their treatment – whether ‘Cured’, ‘Relieved’, or in occasional cases ‘Dead’. Indeed, while searching for someone else, I stumbled upon a record for my wife’s direct ancestor Christopher Black from Sprouston who is recorded as having died in 1827 , the result of ‘pulmonary affection’. This is the only place that I have found his death recorded. He was just 27 years old, and his youngest child Christian was yet to be born.

This was very much the local NHS of its time and one of only a handful of such institutions in Scotland. The popularity of the Dispensary across the age and social spectrum means that patient records are useful in documenting the local Kelso community of the time. A look through the surnames throws up many names still familiar in Kelso in 2015. I’ve analysed names for all those attending in the first 5 years (1777 – 1782) who are listed as from Kelso parish and have been able to come up with a Top 10 of the most popular surnames. They are as follows

Top Kelso Surnames of 1780

1. Ker
2. Dickson
3. Stuart
4. Lamb
5. Craig
6. Rutherford
7. Watson
8. Bain
9. Turnbull
10. Cockburn

At least 5 of these surnames (Ker, Dickson, Rutherford, Turnbull, Cockburn) have distinctive Border origins and so would be expected in 18th century Kelso.  But the presence of so many names from elsewhere is perhaps typical of a prosperous market town where traders had been coming and going for centuries. It would be interesting to follow up with a later sample of names from 50 years later in 1830 to see what has changed. The Dispensary records continue right into the 20th century so there is plenty of scope for investigation !

One of the fascinating things about looking at old censuses is the glimpse that you get into a world which has entirely disappeared. Return to around 1860 and large numbers of rural women and girls were working as bondagers in a system peculiar to the Eastern Borders and Northumberland. A married ploughman (known as a hind) would require to engage another person willing to work long hours in the fields in order to get a contract of employment with a farmer. This was normally a woman. It could be his wife, daughter or a complete stranger. In the case of a stranger being taken on, the hind was required to provide bed and board for the woman and pay her for work done. This ancient feudal system was deeply unpopular with the hinds who felt they got a raw deal. They often only had one room for the whole family and the bondager to live in and were expected to provide her with food and clean her clothes too.  After much unrest in the middle of the 19th century, matters came to a head in 1866 and finally the system of bondage started to be done away with, with the woman continuing to work hard outdoors, but with a direct contract of employment with the farmer. They were then normally referred to as ‘out workers’.

One notable feature of the bondager was the distinctive costume that they wore with extravagant hats and often colourful skirts and wraps. The costume continued beyond the end of the bondage system and could be seen in Border fields up until the period between the 2 World Wars. More information on The Bondagers website.

If you had ancestors who were agricultural labourers in the arable fields of Berwickshire or Roxburghshire in the 19th century then its quite likely that they will have been involved in this system. The census enumerator doesn’t always use the term ‘bondager’ but when you find a record of a family of agriculural labourers apparently with an unrelated servant girl living with them, then that is very likely to be a bondager household.

[photo shows bondagers and hinds in Lowick, Northumberland from thebondagers.com]