The two Statistical Accounts of Scotland covering the 1790s and 1830s are among the first contemporary reports of life during the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Europe. The Statistical Accounts of Scotland provide a rich record of a wide variety of topics: wealth and poverty, climate, agriculture and wildlife and even the model health of the people. The accounts of interest to a range of audiences, from academics from a range of subjects: local historians, family genealogists through to school children studying the history of their local area.
The first attempts were instigated by Sir John Sinclair, member of parliament for Caithness. He wanted a collection of information about the economic and social activities and the natural resources of Scotland. He sent surveys containing 166 questions to nearly 1000 parish ministers in 1790. Some of the ministers' responses were long in coming back but eventually, after sending statical missionaries to hurry up the attentions and a final demand written in red ink, the 21 volumes of the parish reports were completed nine years later.
Sir John was sure that his collection of well-ordered facts would form an account of a quantum of happiness of the communities of Scotland and also be a means of future improvement. In 1832, the clergy were once against asked to describe their parishes. It felt that the time was right for a new addition, because of the great changes which had taken place in Scotland since the 1790s. The new statistical account was written mostly in the 1830s finally being issued as 15 volumes in 1845.
The Statistical Accounts of Scotland service was launched by EDINA ten years ago in 2001. Inside the services, users can search for information using their parish name. If they've got a particular subject of interest to them, they can do a word search and the information is shown in context. Once a user has put the information that they're looking for, say the parish name, into the search box, they will have to choose whether or not they use a first or second account. After that, the information they see is a digitized image of the account of that parish. It's possible to look at a transcript of the parish at the same time which will then allow you to do cutting and pasting. You can print the entire pdf of a parish or you can print individual pages.
The information you can find in the accounts is surprisingly detailed. For example, in the Parish of Linlithgow, there's information about a number of individuals who were employed in the shoe making industry, about 100. And previously over 24,000 pairs of shoes a year had been exported to America. Now, times were harder and the shoes were being sent to the poor of Edinburgh or, in fact, were being sent to soldiers abroad.
As I mentioned previously, users can search for individual words. Now, tea was considered to be a pernicious habit amongst ladies in the poorer class during the 1790s. So if you search for tea drinking, you'll be able to see examples of the ministers' disapproval of this very bad habit set in context.
Amongst the additional resources available within statistical accounts service, there are 32 maps that are being included in the accounts. Now, these maps are among some of the earliest maps produced for Scotland. So in the example that you see, there is a coloured map of Linlithgow. Subscriptions to the service can be taken out by individuals or universities, colleges or any other organizations in the UK or abroad. The service is invaluable to those interested in this period of Scottish history. And the level of usage demonstrates its popularity.