Discovering Scottish Covenanters in Your Family Tree

The Covenanters: A Quick Refresher

If your Scottish ancestors lived in Ayrshire, Galloway, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire or Fife in the seventeenth century, there is a fair chance some of them were caught up in the Covenanting movement. The Covenanters were Presbyterians who signed the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, binding themselves to defend Presbyterian church government against the episcopal system pressed on Scotland by Charles I and, later, Charles II. From 1660 onwards, refusing to conform could bring fines, the quartering of soldiers, imprisonment, transportation, or death. The years 1680 to 1688 are remembered, bleakly, as the Killing Times.

The good news for family historians is that persecution generated paperwork. Courts, councils, kirk sessions and estate offices all had reason to record names — and many of those names are still with us.

Start with Place, Trade and Naming Patterns

Covenanting was strongest not among the gentry but among tenant farmers, weavers, tailors, shoemakers and lesser lairds. Before you search a single record, pin your family to a parish. The south-west — Dumfries and Galloway, Ayrshire, Renfrewshire — and the manufacturing towns of Lanarkshire and Fife were particular strongholds. If your ancestor was a weaver in Sanquhar, Kilmarnock or Lesmahagow, the odds shorten sharply.

Families also left clues in the names they chose. Devout Covenanting households often named children after the martyrs and ministers of the cause — Cargill, Renwick, Guthrie, Peden, Hamilton. The word Covenanter itself occasionally appears as a forename in the following generation. Two or three such names repeating across a parish baptism register is a strong nudge to dig further.

Kirk Session Records: The Richest Single Source

Kirk session minutes are the backbone of Scottish research, and for this period they are indispensable. Sessions recorded discipline, but they also noted attendance at conventicles, refusals to take the Test, and rolls of the poor, the absent and the suspect. After 1662, when episcopacy was restored, many ministers were ejected from their parishes; their successors' minutes sometimes name those who stayed away, or who sheltered the "outted" preachers. Look too for communion rolls and lists of those admitted to the sacrament, which effectively map the godly core of a parish.

Most surviving kirk session records are held by the National Records of Scotland under the CH2 reference series, with some material in local archives. Coverage is patchy — a gap in the minutes does not mean a gap in your family's convictions, only in the clerk's diligence.

Courts, the Privy Council and Forfeited Estates

When Presbyterian worship was outlawed, the state's response was legal as well as military, and that is good news for us. Records worth searching include:

• The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, listing fines, bonds of caution, banishments and orders forbidding contact with rebels.
• Justiciary Court records, including trials for conventicle attendance, arms-bearing and rebellion after the Pentland Rising of 1666 and Bothwell Bridge in 1679.
• Fugitive rolls and denunciations, naming those who failed to appear and were declared outlaws.
• Transportation and plantation lists, recording prisoners sent to Barbados, Jamaica or the American colonies.
• Forfeited estate papers and sasines, documenting land seized from those attainted by Parliament.

Most of these sit with the National Records of Scotland, and printed calendars exist for several of the series — well worth checking in a reference library before you order up originals.

Local Histories, Martyrs' Graves and Memorials

Some of the most rewarding evidence is physical. Martyrs' memorials stand across the south-west and beyond: the Grassmarket and Greyfriars in Edinburgh, Wigtown, Deerness, Anwoth, Kirkcudbright and a dozen quieter kirkyards. Local heritage bodies and Historic Environment Scotland maintain records of these monuments, and many carry inscriptions naming the dead and the circumstances of their deaths. Local history societies in Galloway, Ayrshire and the Borders have published transcripts, gravestone inscriptions and detailed parish studies, often with far more colour than any national index.

Two printed works are worth consulting early. Robert Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland and the earlier Cloud of Witnesses, essentially a roll of martyrs, both name individuals, parishes and circumstances, and both are indexed. The Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae will identify the ministers of your parishes, including those ejected in 1662 — a useful bridge to the congregations they served.

The Diaspora: Ulster, America and Beyond

Not every Covenanter stayed to face the courts. Many fled to Ulster in the 1660s and 1670s, where Presbyterian congregations in Antrim and Down still carry the surnames of Scottish families; others were transported, or emigrated later to New Jersey and the Carolinas. If your Scottish trail goes cold around 1670, look across the water. Ulster Presbyterian registers and later Scots-Irish migration lists can pick the story up again, often with a helpful note of the family's original parish.

Putting It All Together

• Pin your family to a parish, and if possible to a trade.
• Read the kirk session minutes for that parish across the 1660s to 1690s.
• Search the Privy Council register and justiciary records for your surnames.
• Check local history society publications and gravestone transcripts for martyrs, conventicles and field preachings.
• Cross-check Wodrow and the Cloud of Witnesses for named individuals.
• Record your reasoning carefully — a shared surname is not proof of Covenanting sympathies, and many families conformed outwardly while worshipping privately.

Above all, be patient and read widely. The Covenanting story is one of ordinary people — farmers, weavers, women who hid fugitives in their barns — and their names survive in records that were meant to punish them. Finding even one can turn a bare list of baptisms into a family history with a heartbeat.