Scottish Valuation Rolls

The official government resource for family history records in Scotland, Scotland's People, has just made the Valuation Rolls for 1915 available online. This is an exciting development, and could prove to be very useful to many researchers tracing their Scottish ancestors at the time of the First World War.

The Valuation Rolls provide information for properties throughout the country. They list the owner, occupier, or tenant of each property. They can therefore be used in conjunction with the 1911 census to track an ancestor's movements between 1911 and 1915. It is important to remember that these Valuation Rolls are for a period when many men were away fighting in the First World War. As a result, it is often wives that are listed as tenants, rather than their husbands.

Every time records like these are released it allows us to develop a clearer understanding of how our ancestors lived and worked. For that reason, the release of the Scottish Valuation Rolls for 1915 should be viewed with a sense of excitement and optimism. In fact, Scotland's People have announced plans to eventually release Valuation Rolls for years between 1855 and 1955.