Family Historian User Group

I'm not sure if i should ask this here or on a more general board. but as I use AS to enter my Census records I'll ask it here.

I have recently moved into the realm of Scottish Census records from Ancestry.  What I am not sure of is what reference to put in the  'Ref. ID' box in AS.   Do the HO & RG numbers still apply or are they only for England and Wales? If not, what other reference do I use?

Any help gratefully received.

Regards,

maggie



ID:4600

The census originals for Scotland are held by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS), so the Kew references do not apply.

Because I start with the image from ScotlandsPeople, I've always used their references of which this is an example (format is District, County, GROS Data)
PANBRIDE ANGUS 316/00 004/290

Ancestry gives this for the same line:
Parish: Panbride; ED: 4; Page: 29; Line: 5; Roll CSSCT1891_105; Year: 1891.

Trying to marry them up (SP 1st) doesn't get me very far -
316 is Panbride parish (see GROS site for a list)
004 just might match ED 4
But how 290 carries forward I've no idea.

Which leaves me none the wiser, never mind you! If you were to use the Ancestry reference of
Parish: Panbride; ED: 4; Page: 29; Line: 5
that would seem a good bet - except it's quite useless since you can't use these details in Ancestry to find the data again!

Thanks, Adrian, for your reply.

The Parish: Panbride; ED: 4; Page: 29; Line: 5 option seems a good one but would make the source title very long!!

I may just put any reference info into the Note box in the source.

Regards,

maggie

1. Personally I usually keep my source titles in 'human-speak' with no references, e.g. 'Census Entry: Bruce, Edith, 1871, Dundee', recording the reference in the note box and the identification within the repository (which has to be added on the 'all' tab for a source, as a sub-item to repository) - somehow it feels safer having it in both places! Otherwise, as you say, things get a bit lengthy!

2. I did ask on the Angus mailing list if they had any better ideas and the consensus went something like this:
- nobody responded who knew how the paper pages were referenced at the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS)
- if you went to the GROS today and asked for a census, you'd be given access to the internal version of the ScotlandsPeople web-site. Therefore, the SP reference seems about as official as it is possible to get.

The SP format goes something like this:
282/02 006/02 041

282/02 = Dundee parish, 2nd district
006/02 = Enumeration District 6 and while we're not sure what the /02 means, it's very possibly the 2nd book for the ED
041 = page 41

Note 1 - this omits which census it is!
Note 2 - this also isn't quite what I originally posted because I had /290 for page 29. When I rechecked that very census image, it now has '029' at the end. So either I wrote it down wrong or the format has changed subtly over the years.
Note 3 - this doesn't translate well (if at all!) from the Ancestry reference.

Personally, I think that if you're working off the Ancestry records, it makes sense to record the Ancestry reference. Nobody else can use it to get directly to the data, but if they repeat your search, they'll know if they've got the right 'John Smith' by checking their Ancestry reference against yours.