Tracing your Scottish Borders Ancestors
Tracing your family history is a journey of discovery which leads you to explore the lives and times of your ancestors. Visiting the Scottish Borders in the footsteps of your family can be a rewarding experience, enabling you to find out more about your ancestral homeland and gain a sense of “place”.
This source list points you to the key areas of information.
This page is also available to download as a PDF.
By using these records, it should be possible to trace a Scottish Borders family relatively easily back to the beginning 19th century, if not earlier. It is in the nature of a detective story, working systematically backwards from one known fact to another, always verifying and not relying on one source.
Family history is more than just dates and names, and can lead you into local history and social history – where did your ancestors live, how did they live, what did they do?
You might like to explore issues of name patterns, occupational patterns, child labour, living conditions, place names, house history etc. The collections at the Heritage Hub can help you in this.
