New OPR from 1835.....

[jennyblain]

Some of the Linlithgow records are like that - with various details of costs, but not nearly as much as this, interspersed with the marriages, and as David says no clear distinction. Fascinating! Also I found a 1696 marriage which was apparently listed twice (same parish and date) and one entry turned out to be a list of 'charges', being apparently from the kirk's account book.

Jenny

[DavidWW]

David

Thanks for the information on the file I finally uploaded.

After I sorted my impatience out last night I had a good look through it. After reading your post I now can see that it is a financial record, albeit with the Banns there too. It listed mortcloth hirings, a benefactors legacy plus all the poor relief outgoings. Indeed a very interesting document to find.

Absolutely

And many such other sets of acounts exist in amongst the kirk session records, but haven't needed to be copied across to GROS since there is in existence a proper Old Parochial Register recording births (baptisms), marriages (banns/proclamations), and deaths (mortcloth hire).

In other words such "mixed" records will normally only be found in the OPR records when there is no extant OPR, or there never was one!

But when there is a separate, extant OPR, there can often be such sets of accounts like this in the sessional records, but don't always expect to see such a level of detail.

It's quite common to find the disbursement of poor relief covered by a line in the accounts such as "To the Poor £5 3s 4d" .

The situation in respect of the content of the sessional records is very similar to the OPRs in that no detailed direction was provided by the kirk on how accounts should be reported in the minutes of the kirk session, - a very detailed format such as here, or just a bare summary. Obviously, in the latter case, someone somewhere had to have had the highly detailed figures, but often these didn't come forward into the formal sessional records, with "balance sheet" type summary info only making it into the actual kirk session records.

David