Archives Online – Maps and Plans

ScotlandsPeople is our ancestry research service and Scotland’s leading website for genealogical research. In addition to records of births, deaths and marriages in Scotland going back centuries, you can also find many more record sets from the National Records of Scotland archives…

As well as updating ScotlandsPeople with genealogical records of births, marriages and deaths every year, we’re constantly adding to our record sets, making more of our archives than ever before available to search and view online – church records, photographs, government records and much more to come.

As part of our commitment to making more of our archives available for you to view at home, we’ve now added thousands of images to our Maps & Plans feature, which gives you access to historic maps of Scotland’s towns, cities, countryside, industrial sites and much more, as well as architectural designs for buildings around the country.

Most recently, we’ve added over 4,500 post-war agricultural planning maps to ScotlandsPeople, as well as over 400 heritors’ plans.

The Department of Agriculture for Scotland plans of farm boundaries and types of farming are a snapshot of Scotland from 1944-54, showing land used for farming, hill grazing, market gardening, forestry and more. The plans were created to help safeguard food production during and after World War II.

Coverage of the farm boundary plans is close to national, while farming type was recorded less comprehensively, with priority given to areas likely to be considered for development.

These records can help build up a picture of how of how land use in a particular area has changed over time. They are a valuable source for research on agriculture, land use and post-war planning more widely.

We’ve also added hundreds of images to our existing collection of heritors’ plans, with almost 1,000 from the collection now online. The new plans mostly show architectural drawings of churches and manses around Scotland.

We’ll be adding new record sets and broadening those that are already available throughout 2022, so watch this space for news.

You can find out more about searching our maps and plans online here on the ScotlandsPeople website.