Scotland 1600-1999

During these 400 years there have been less than 600 Broket births in Scotland, more than half of them in the last 100 years.

Table 1 provides data of recorded births/christenings, marriages and deaths in Scotland over the 4 centuries, extracted from the Scottish Record Office indexes and organised by half century:

Baptisms and banns were first ordered to be kept in Scotland in 1552, and burials from 1565, but little was done to enforce the orders, nor even a Privy Council Order of 1616, and the quality of the Scottish registers was never as good as in England and Wales (Hey 1996 p 342).

The first Brokets in Scottish registers are from Mid Calder in 1609, and for the next 90 years the Mid and West Calder registers provide most of the recorded Brokets. However, registers from 1700-49—by which time they were being kept better—show that Brokets were still only in a few other Scottish parishes, principally the 3 neighbouring ones of Lesmahagow, Carnwath and Crawfordjohn further south in Lanarkshire, and in Edinburgh (Table 2 below). This suggests that the 1600-49 and 1650-99 births in Table 1 only need to be augmented by a dozen at the most to gain a more accurate picture of actual Broket numbers.

Records of Broket births increased considerably in the half century when civil registration began—1855—further suggesting that figures for earlier half centuries could be underestimates. But again the location patterns in Table 2 suggest that this 1850-99 increase could rather simply be a mirror of the national expansion in birth rate at the time. A similar increase can be seen 1900-49, especially in Glasgow, explainable in this case mainly by the expansion of the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde.

Table 2 shows the changes in location of Scottish Brokets 1600-1899:

Table 3 shows the high proportion of 20th C Scottish Glaswegian Brokets: