Perthshire records go online

57,000 historic records from the Perthshire area of Scotland were made available by the website Ancestry.co.uk this week.

The records date from 1566 to 1901 and cover records from school admissions and surveys of the local militia.

They include the Perthshire School Registers of Admissions and Withdrawals, which contains the names of around 75,000 pupils covering the period 1869 to 1901. Each record typically contains the name and date of birth of the child, their home address and notes on their academic progress.

The Perthshire Militia Survey of 1802 also forms part of the archive. It contains more than 1,300 records of men in every household who were eligible to fight in the militia. The records were collated from forms sent to households in 1802 demanding that every able-bodied man between the age of 18 and 45 made themselves known.

Recent releases by Ancestry have not met with universal applause, so it will be interesting to see how accurate and complete these turn out to be.