Parish level statistics for Scotland taken from the 1871 census

Table ID:

PAR_1871_S     (1252402)

Contents:

Parish level statistics for Scotland taken from the 1871 census

Approx. number of rows:

2,245

Table type:

Raw Data

Documentation Author:

Humphrey Southall

Geography:

Reporting units are identified by:
   Parish- or sub-Parish-level Unit

Chronology:

The data cover the period 1861 to 1871.

Sources:

1. This is a very full transcription of Table I in Population tables, Scotland, Vol. I: "Scotland in civil counties and parishes, showing the acreage, the number of families, of houses inhabited, uninhabited, and building; the number of the total population and of persons of each sex; the number of children from 5 to 13 years of age in the receipt of education; the number of rooms with windows; the number of persons temporarily absent or present in each parish or subdivision thereof on the 3d April 1871. For comparison's sake, there is added the number of families, persons of each sex, houses, and rooms with windows in 1861".
2. It was computerised by Humphrey Southall in December 2022, using Finereader OCR software. This is consequently an independent transcription of parish names.

---

Notes:

1. In addition to the usual counts of persons and buildings, this parish-level table includes counts of numbers of children in schools for 1871, and counts of rooms with windows for both 1861 and 1871. However, this information is hard to use without appropriate divisors. The table is rather more useful for how it is markedly clearer than earlier Scottish listings in identifying which areas were seen by the census as being Parishes.
2. The first two columns in the original table are headed "No. of Parish." and "PARISHES, with Particulars :--Burgh, Town, Island, Military, Shipping, and Area of Land." The first column is included here unchanged, as it seems to identify unambiguously which names are those of parishes, but the information in the second column has been unpacked into a number of separate database columns:
   • Un-indented and capitalised names, which are generally the names of parishes but are sometimes the names of urban units containing parishes, are held in area_name.
   • Indented names, i.e. the names or labels for "Burghs, Towns" etc, are held in sub_area. NB no rows have values in both area_name and sub_area.
   • Parish acreages, which appear right-aligned, have been separated out into area_a. However, this data is generally absent for parishes and counties in the far north, and incomplete for some counties further south. This presumably reflects the progress of Ordnance Survey mapping of Scotland.
   • The column also includes bracketed and otalicised text, most often indicating which other counties include the other parts of divided parishes. This text has been moved to the notes column here.
   • The sco_par column is what has been used for finding par_unit values in the AUO. In general it holds either, for "Parish" rows, a value taken from area_name or, for "Parish Part" rows, a value from the preceding area_name. For the exceptions, see below.
3. Unlike some other Scottish parish-level tables, this source table makes no references at all to any kind of district, other than distinguishing "Island Portions" for Argyll, Imverness and Ross & cromarty. Neither does it separate any cities from the counties. It does very carefully separate out all burghs, which means firstly that the population of a single burgh may be divided between several parishes, some of which may include parts of more than one burgh. and secondly that it often includes separate rows for a single burgh within a single parish: the area that was within both the Parliamentary Burgh and the Royal Burgh, the area that was Parliamentary but not Royal, and the area that was Royal but not Parliamentary. Because of this complexity, as yet no attempt has been made to match the burghs in this table to the AUO.
4. The value in sco_par has been explicitly set in the following cases:
   • The cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth, and the town of Greenock, all contain multiple parishes whose names, as listed, all start with the city/town name; and the source table lists only an overall acreage for the city/towns, not for these parishes. In all of these cases, sco_par has been set to the city/town name.
5. The structure of the source table means that many rows of type "Parish" have either no numeric data or only an acreage, all the data being held for the following rows of type "Parish Part". Parish statistics should therefore be extracted by summing over values of par_unit. They can also be extracted using combinations of sco_cnty and sco_par, although this is complicated by many parishes having parts in multiple counties. Note that some effort has been made to ensure that completely empty rows of data have entirely null values, rather than zeroes, and separately that empty acreage values are null, not zero.

---

Checking:

1. All rows pass the four single-row checksums that can be calculated: that the sum of males and females matches the total number of persons for each of the 1871 overall population, 1871 persons temporarily absent, 1871 persons temporarily pressent, and 1861 overall population.
2. Multi-row check sums have been computed for all numeric columns except acreages, for parish areas within counties and for counties within Scotland. Following various corrections, two inconsistencies remain:
   • That the reported county total for rooms with windows in 1871 in the county of Edinburgh (i.e. Midlothian) is greater than the sum of all component areas by 5.
   • That the reported national total for children in education in 1871 is less than the sum of the counties by 20. This is due, specifically, to a difference between the figures listed for the county of Roxburgh with its parish data (8,672) and the Roxburgh figure in the national summary at the start of the tabulations (8,652), the former figure being that used here.
3. Following the addition of some alternative names to the AUO, all except 13 parishes now match. However, a larger problem is that 47 of the parishes that have been matched lack a polygon in the pre-1890 Scottish parishes GIS.

---

Indices:

Index	Type	Column(s) indexed
par_1871_s_pkey	Primary key	rec_num
par_1871_s_idx	Unique	sco_cnty, area_name, sub_area, rec_num

---

Constraints:

The table has the following associated constraints:

Constraint	Type	Details
par_1871_s_pkey	Primary Key	See details above for primary key index

---

Columns within table:

Column	Type	Contents
row_type	Text string (max.len.=16).	Type of row: Nation (1) County (33) Parish (995) Parish Part (1216)
sco_cnty	Text string (max.len.=24).	Name of County
par_num	Integer number.	Number of the parish, as listed in the report. Although the column is not labelled, the presence of these numbers seems to be the clearest indication a unit was a parish.
sco_par	Text string (max.len.=44).	The name of the parish, as used for matching with the AUO.
part_of	Text string (max.len.=6).	Set to "P" to indicate that another part of the parish is listed in another county. Further details are usually provided in the notes.
area_name	Text string (max.len.=44).	Non-indented area names, which are usually the names of parishes.
sub_area	Text string (max.len.=84).	Indented area names. These include the names of burghs, parish landwards and "Shipping". This last may appear more than once within a single parish as, for example, there may be separate rows for shipping within a burgh and for shipping within the landward area; in these cases, the word "Shipping" will be further indented below the name of the sub-area the ships were associated with,
area_a	Integer number.	Area in Acres. This is included only for parishes in southern and central Scotand, presumably reflecting the progress of the Ordnance Survey.
sep_fam_1871	Integer number.	1871: Separate Families.
inh_1871	Integer number.	1871: HOUSES: Inhabited.
unh_1871	Integer number.	1871: HOUSES: Uninhabited.
bih_1871	Integer number.	1871: HOUSES: Building.
ma_1871	Integer number.	1871: PERSONS: Males.
fe_1871	Integer number.	1871: PERSONS: Females.
pop_1871	Integer number.	1871: PERSONS: Total.
educ_1871	Integer number.	1871: Children from 5 to 13 receiving Education.
rm_wind_1871	Integer number.	1871: Rooms with one or more Windows.
abs_ma_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Absent: Males.
abs_fe_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Absent: Females.
abs_pop_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Absent: Total.
pres_ma_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Present: Males.
pres_fe_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Present: Females.
pres_pop_1871	Integer number.	1871: Temporarily Present: Total.
sep_fam_1861	Integer number.	1861: Separate Families.
inh_1861	Integer number.	1861: HOUSES: Inhabited.
unh_1861	Integer number.	1861: HOUSES: Uninhabited.
bih_1861	Integer number.	1861: HOUSES: Building.
ma_1861	Integer number.	1861: PERSONS: Males.
fe_1861	Integer number.	1861: PERSONS: Females.
pop_1861	Integer number.	1861: PERSONS: Total.
rm_wind_1861	Integer number.	1861: Rooms with one or more Windows.
notes	Text string (max.len.=204).	Notes. These have been extracted from the "Parishes with Particulars" column, and most often give details of where the other parts of divided parishes were.
cnty_unit	Integer number.	Unique ID number for county level unit
par_unit	Integer number.	Unique ID number for parish level unit
rec_num	Integer number.	Sequence number to keep data in original order.