News: Wills and testaments 1902-1925

Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs, Fiona Hyslop, said:

"ScotlandsPeople is a wonderful gateway to Scotland's wealth of archives that tell the story of our nation and its people. These wills and testaments offer a compelling and moving insight into the lives of Scots a century ago and provide a powerful connection to our past. I welcome the addition of so many more wills to the digital resources that can be enjoyed by the people of Scotland, and people of Scottish descent everywhere."

Audrey Robertson, Acting Registrar General and Keeper of the Records of Scotland, said:

"We're proud to be marking the tenth anniversary of ScotlandsPeople by creating a major enhancement of our popular resource for Scottish family history. The 400,000 additional testament entries from 1902 to 1925 will open up interesting new avenues for people in search of their Scottish ancestry."

Rich and poor

Both the enormously rich and the very poor can be found in these fascinating records. At one end of the social spectrum was Margaret Bailley (or Baillie, nee Donaghue) who died in Criaglockhart Poorhouse, Edinburgh, in 1904, leaving an estate valued at £16.16s. At the other was Donald Alexander Smith, First Baron of Strathcona and Mount Royal, whose estate was valued at over £4.6 million in 1914, and would today be worth about £250 million.

More than 35 millionaires have been identified in the testaments, of whom the richest were:

1. Henry Overton Wills (died 1912), £5.2 million
2. Donald Alexander Smith, First Baron of Strathcona and Mount Royal (died 1914), £4.6 million
3. George Coats, Baron Glentanar (died 1918), £4.3 million
4. Andrew Carnegie (died 1919), worth over £350 million, but left only £68,000 in Scotland

Small estates

After the introduction of simpler and cheaper procedures for recording personal estates of small value, which were introduced in 1894, more testaments were recorded. A so-called 'small estate' was defined as a deceased person's whole heritable and moveable estate up to the value of £500.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen

The latest release also includes the testaments of more than 9,000 Scottish soldiers and other servicemen and women of all ranks, out of a total of about 148,000 who died during the First World War. During the war more testaments were recorded overall, and the numbers peaked in 1919 because of the continued registering of testaments of the war dead, and also the lasting effects ofthe Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.

A separate and larger group of soldiers' wills form the First World War can be found in the NRS online catalogue. Although images are not available online there is guidance about searching for and ordering them.

More people, more testaments

From 1513-1901, a period of almost 400 years, about 600,000 testaments were recorded in Scotland, but in less than 25 years from 1902-1925, some 400,000 more testaments (two thirds of the previous total), were recorded. These figures probably represent more than 400,000 individual people up to 1901, and about 268,000 from 1902-1925. During the whole period from about 1600 the Scottish population grew six times (600%), from an estimated 800,000 in 1600 to 4.89 million in 1925.

The newly released records, which are held by the National Records of Scotland, cover the whole of mainland Scotland and the Western Isles. Plans are in hand to include Orkney and Shetland, whose testamentary records are held locally on behalf of the Keeper of the Records of Scotland. Special arrangements are being made to digitise them in order to complete the new resource.