National Records of Scotland

Preserving the past, Recording the present, Informing the future

Church Court Records Online

We're launching our new website in early December
All content from the current site will be available in our web archive

Church Court Records Online

Introduction
What the records contain
Local archive access in Scotland
Wider access

Introduction

In partnership with several local authority and university archives in Scotland, National Records of Scotland (NRS) look after the records of the Church of Scotland and several other Presbyterian denominations.

The records consist of the minutes and accounts of kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. They also contain a wide variety of other documents, providing a picture of everyday life in Scotland from the sixteenth century onwards and amount to more than 25,000 volumes, about 5 million pages of information.

What the records contain

The Scottish Reformation saw the introduction of a new hierarchical system of courts to run church affairs: the General Assembly, synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions.

The records created by church courts are very useful for family history, local history and academic research. Of most interest for genealogists and local historians are the minutes of the kirk sessions, which typically contain a detailed and often colourful record of the discipline the minister and kirk elders handed out to errant parishioners for offences such as drunkenness, swearing, breaking the Sabbath, quarrelling and sexual misdemeanours. Other records include proclamations of banns, communion rolls, seat rent books and poor relief accounts.

Deposited in NRS since 1960, church court records are cared for by the NRS and by local archives under charge and superintendence of the Keeper of the Records of Scotland. They include the records of other presbyterian churches which united with the Church of Scotland.

Local archive access in Scotland

NRS and archives which hold church records under charge and superintendence of the Keeper of the Records of Scotland offer a service which opens up access to records throughout Scotland. The following archives currently offer the service in their search rooms:

Please contact the relevant archive for further information regarding access.

Wider access

NRS has released church court records for general access online. The first releases of records (on the ScotlandsPeople website) have been baptism, marriage and burial registers from kirk session records for congregations of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Original Secession Church (and subsequent secession churches), the Relief Church, and the Free Church which re-joined the Church of Scotland. A list of the congregations concerned can be found in the Church Registers guide on the ScotlandsPeople website.

In March 2021, NRS launched a new service on ScotlandsPeople called Virtual Volumes, which comprised images of more than a million pages from around 6,000 volumes of kirk session and other court records of the Church of Scotland.

In June 2024 there was a substantial release of new Church of Scotland court records onto Virtual Volumes. These included additional kirk session, presbytery and synod records and, for the first time, records from the General Assembly.

You can search and browse the church court records for free and pay a small fee if you wish to save or download the images to your account.

For more information about this service and the records available, please read the guidance on church court records, kirk session records and Using Virtual Volumes on ScotlandsPeople.