Was your ancestor buried in Scotland, or had close relatives in the country? Discover final resting places, together with many details about lives lived in this collection of Scottish cemetery gravestone inscriptions, the largest of its kind online.
Each result will give you a transcript (and sometimes an image) of your ancestor’s burial monument. These records were created by a collaborative effort of a variety of family history societies and independent licensors, with transcripts that will vary depending on the age of the monument and its legibility. Below is a list of what you may find in the transcript.
Name
Death date
Denomination
Graveyard
Place and county
Inscription –you may discover the individual’s age at the time of death, who else is buried at the same site (including their ages and death dates), and who erected the monument.
Memorial reference
Notes
OS grid reference – this reference will identify a position on all ordnance survey maps
Source’s website – a link to the society or licensor who created the transcript
Monumental inscriptions are memorials placed on a person’s grave or burial place. They vary in size and in how much is recorded about the person. Monumental inscriptions are an excellent resource for family historians because many record the names of other relatives such as a spouse, children or parents, as well as their birth and death dates.
For example, the record for Katherine Alexander holds six additional names: Katherine’s husband, two daughters, two sons, and daughter-in-law. Katherine’s eldest son was Captain Harry Charles Birnie. The inscription for Captain Birnie reads, ‘Birnie, DSO, RD, RNR, elder brother of Trinity House and commodore of ocean convoys, died gallantly in North Atlantic through enemy action 9 March 1943 aged 60’. The facts found in the inscription enabled us to find a death record for Harry Birnie in Findmypast’s British nationals armed forces deaths 1796-2005. Additionally, Birnie was found in the 1891 England, Wales & Scotland Census living in Aberdour with his parents and siblings.
Many of these records were created by local family history society volunteers, this collection currently includes records from:
Aberdeen & North East Scotland FHS
Caithness FHS
Dumfries & Galloway FHS
East Ayrshire FHS
Highland FHS
Lanarkshire FHS
Moray Burial Ground Research Group
Scottish Genealogy Society
Tay Valley FHS
Troon@Ayrshire FHS
Many of these records were indexed using new technology which means that some names and dates may not exactly align. Additionally, spelling of names, or reading of stones that have been stood outdoors for many years may mean that inscriptions can be slightly different than expected.
If you cannot find a name you are looking for, try using the keyword search and filtering by county or place to narrow down your results.