Scotland's People Release Valuation Rolls For 1905

Back in April last year I wrote about how it was now possible to view the Valuation Rolls for 1915 on the Scotland's People website. Well, they have now released 74000 more images, this time for the year 1905. The files can be searched by name or address, and contain "the names of the owners, tenants and occupiers of each property."

While the 1905 Valuation Rolls do list entire families as the census does, they are nevertheless useful for pinpointing exactly where an ancestor was living midway through the decade. They can therefore be used along with the 1901 and 1911 census records, and the 1915 Valuation Rolls, to create a time-line of an ancestor's movements over a 14 year period. 

Another useful feature of the Valuation Rolls is helping to establish an ancestor's social class. Knowing whether they owned or rented a property is helpful in determining their status. 

The Valuation Rolls for 1905 and 1915 can be searched now at Scotland's People. 

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.