Earliest Recorded Baptism
A baby girl called Christine Hay was baptised over 450 years
ago in the village of Errol in Perthshire. Her parents, Peter
Hay and Jonet Fermline brought her to be baptised on 27 December
1553 and this would have been an everyday event, if not for the
fact that Christine's baptism record is
the earliest known in Scotland. The previous year,
the pre-Reformation Catholic church had ordained that every parish
should keep a register of baptisms and of proclamations of
marriage. Christine's baptism is the earliest result of this of
which a record survives.
Christine's record has come down to us in a 17th century copy held
in New Register House in Edinburgh. On the shelves along with the
Errol register are over 4,000 other parish registers, recording the
baptisms, marriages and burials of the famous and the not so
famous. These include the proclamation of the banns of Mary Queen
of Scots and Lord Darnley, and the rebuke uttered by the Mauchline
kirk elders to Robert Burns and Jean Armour on account of their
irregular marriage.
These records are now old and fragile, and visitors to New Register
House are usually only able to see them as microfilm copies.
However, the
General
Register Office for Scotland are now creating digital images of
these records, as part of the DIGROS (Digitally Imaging the
Genealogical Records of Scotlands people) project. These
images will make the records much more widely available to family
historians and others not only in New Register House and in local
registration offices, but on the
Scotlands
People website, where an image of the Christine Hay record can
be now be seen.
