Genealogy in the Highlands

Those seeking their ancestors in the Highlands start in the same way as family historians in the rest of the country - see Genealogy in Scotland - and once back past the era of the Statutory Registers and the Censuses are subject to the same vagaries of fortune with regard to further progress using the OPRs, collections of monumental inscriptions, local newspapers, parish and county histories, etc. In other words, so much depends on what sort of people your ancestors were, and if they were associated with a church, parish, or area for which the records were written down relatively early, and have survived. 

However, in the Highlands the written record does tend to start later than elsewhere in the country, and things are further complicated by the need often to understand the use and translation of Gaelic names - both for people and for places - and to appreciate that in certain areas, and within certain clans, surnames were not always fixed (see the appropriate pages in the Genealogy section of this website for help with these topics). 

How much these factors come into play may well depend on how recently Gaelic was spoken in the area your ancestors came from; but the closer any area is to their Gaelic past the more strongly the oral tradition is likely to have survived there, and it can often help fill-in some of the gaps in the written record. We're fortunate therefore that in the area where Gaelic remains strongest - the Outer Hebrides - many of those oral traditions have been written down and meshed with the written records by professional family historian Bill Lawson, and that Highland Council's own genealogist Alistair Macleod is also a native Gaelic speaker. 

Most areas in the Highlands also have amateur local historians who, if they don't know the answer themselves, will almost certainly know who to ask in pursuit of a particular problem. Some of these invaluable sources of help are listed on the local contacts page of this website, and you may be able to contact others through the Highland Family History Society.