Births, Baptisms, Marriages & Deaths

Old Parish Registers
Before civil registration of births, deaths & marriages began in 1855 the only official records of these events were those entered in church registers. The amount of information entered in the register varied between parishes and between ministers, and it was often very sparse. The usual practice was to record marriages and baptisms, but not deaths or burials. In the later baptism records of some parishes the date of birth of the child was noted as well as the date of baptism. The parish records were not always complete; in some registers, as in that of Tiree in the 1700s, there were gaps of weeks or months where the minister of the day neglected to enter marriages and baptisms that he had performed. Tiree was part of the Parish of Tiree & Coll, but a separate register was kept for each island.

Children baptised in churches other than the Church of Scotland were not recorded in the Old Parish Registers, so there was no record of their existence other than in census returns. And although ministers of the Church of Scotland were expected to record marriages in their parish of people of other denominations, they may not have done so. These and the various other reasons for missing records in the Old Parish Registers are explained by Louise MacDougall in her article Missing Records in Old Parish Registers of Tiree & Coll: 1766-1854 .


Tiree Parish Register 1766-1774
This single register, which records marriages, baptisms and proceedings of kirk sessions from 15th July 1766 to 20th May 1774, is believed to be the oldest surviving register of the Parish of Tiree. An undated transcript of entries in the register was made some years ago by Archibald Strath Maxwell, a professional genealogy researcher, and later reproduced on LDS Film No.0845450. The data presented here were transcribed from the LDS film by Ann Hentschel and edited by Keith Dash. To download the new transcript, click here .

Indexing the Tiree Old Parish Registers. Work on indexing the marriages, baptisms and births in the Old Parish Registers started 30 or more years ago with Donald MacFadyen of Ontario, Canada, who wanted to see the information in the registers available to the public. Several people worked on the project over the years, and in 2004 Louise MacDougall started pulling the pieces together. Donald MacFadyen's vision is gradually coming to fruition, thanks to Lynn Clark, Louise MacDougall, Barbara Humphrey and others who have put in long hours of exacting work doing the data entry. The indexes are in searchable Excel format.

Tiree Marriages 1766-1854
With thanks to Donald MacFadyen, Lynn Clark and Louise MacDougall. To download the index, click here .

McPhaiden Baptisms 1766-1854
With thanks to Donald MacFadyen, Lynn Clark and Louise MacDougall. This set contains all the baptisms where the child's father or mother was a McPhaiden or a variant of that name. To download the set, click here .

Tiree Baptisms 1766-1854
With thanks to Barbara Humphrey, Louise MacDougall and others. The index of baptisms from 1766 to 1854, excluding those where the child's father or mother is a McPhaiden or a variant of that name, is divided into 3 sets. To download a set, click on its title in the list below.

Tiree Births 1855-1875
Civil registration of births, deaths and marriages began in the United Kingdom in 1855. The International Genealogical Index (IGI) has an index of civil registrations of births in Scotland for the years 1855-1875, and Russ McGillivray has extracted the Tiree births and formatted them into a searchable Excel spreadsheet, which is reproduced here with his permission. To download the spreadsheet, click here .

Henderson Births, Marriages & Deaths
Archie Henderson, Professional Genealogist, Glasgow, has compiled spreadsheets listing Tiree Henderson births 1766-present, marriages 1766-present and deaths 1855-present, some with notes on family origins in Mull, which he has provided freely to this website. To download the spreadsheets, click here.