How I Go About Researching Aberdeen's Notable Dead
I've spent years pulling apart old obituary archives to piece together who actually shaped this city. It's not glamorous work. Most of it happens at 11pm on a Tuesday when you should be asleep. The Daily World Aberdeen archives are one of the better sources, but they come with enough quirks that new researchers waste half their time before they figure out what they're doing wrong. Here's how the process actually works.
Unveiling The Lives Of Aberdeens Most Notable Residents A Journey Through Daily World Aberdeen Obituaries
Start with the National Records of Scotland's death register rather than jumping straight into newspaper archives. I learned this the hard way after wasting three days cross-referencing newspaper clippings that contained spelling errors and omitted dates. The official death certificates give you the exact date, the registered informant, and the usual residential address. That informant is almost always a surviving relative, and in my experience about 40% of the time it's someone who actually knew the deceased personally rather than a distant cousin who was shown a photograph. Once you have the death certificate, you go to the Daily World archives. They have digitised most of their post-1950 issues, but here's the part nobody tells you: the search function is terrible. Searching by surname alone returns thousands of irrelevant results because Aberdeenshire has an absurd concentration of people with surnames like Macdonald, Fraser, and Campbell. You need to combine the surname with the approximate year and ideally a known organisation or street name from the death record. The obituaries themselves vary wildly in quality. For genuinely notable residents — people who ran hospitals, chaired boards, served on the Town Council, or built something that still exists — you'll get a proper article of three or four hundred words. For ordinary working people, which is the majority, you get a paragraph or two that essentially says they died at home and were survived by their wife and three children. Both are useful if you know what to look for.
I keep a spreadsheet tracking every name I come across. Columns for full name, date of death, source references, whether the person appears in any other archival material, and a brief note on what made them locally significant. This sounds tedious but it saves you from repeating searches six months later when you've already forgotten what you found. I once spent an entire afternoon researching a woman I'd clearly spent three hours on the previous November. The spreadsheet entry would have saved me six hours. The real difficulty comes with people who were notable in their lifetime but poorly documented after death. I spent two weeks tracking down the obituary of a man who had been chairman of a local building society for thirty years. The death certificate listed his address correctly, but the Daily World had published the obituary under a slightly different surname spelling — he'd been known locally as "McKerrow" but it was printed as "M'Kerrow." I found it only because I was searching another document that used the alternative spelling. This kind of variation is extremely common in Aberdeen records. Highland and Lowland naming conventions collided repeatedly in this city, and nobody standardised anything until well into the twentieth century. For pre-1950 research, you're working with physical copies at the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenship Archives or microfilm. The reading room staff are helpful but they can only pull so many reels before they hit their quota. Plan your visit around the specific references you need rather than browsing. I've seen people waste entire mornings looking through box after box of unrelated material because they didn't have the catalogue references written down beforehand. The online catalogue is decent but it's not exhaustive, and some box descriptions are wrong or incomplete.
Get the Full Details
Obituaries sometimes contain useful genealogical information but they are not reliable primary sources for facts. I've seen death dates corrected in later editions, addresses that were wrong, and occupations that were either exaggerated or simplified for a general readership. Always verify against census records, parish registers, or professional directories where possible. A man described as "a prominent merchant" in his obituary might have been a shopkeeper with five employees. Neither is false, but the difference matters for historical accuracy. One thing the Daily World does particularly well is recording women's lives, especially from the 1960s onwards. Earlier obituaries tended to reduce women to lists of surviving relatives and charitable affiliations, but the coverage improved noticeably over time. You'll find more substantive biographical detail for women who worked as teachers, nurses, or local politicians than you would in many other regional newspapers. That's worth noting if your research focuses on social history rather than political or economic history. If you're specifically looking for the most notable residents, start with who appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or the Biographical Dictionary of Edinburgh and Glasgow Architects, then trace backwards through their obituaries. This reverse approach is more efficient than trying to identify notable people from scratch. The Daily World index doesn't have a "local dignitaries" category, so you'll miss important figures if you rely entirely on keyword searching.
The biggest limitation of this whole process is simply what survives. Many obituaries from the 1940s and earlier were never digitised and some have deteriorated to the point of illegibility. Church records from the Free Church and United Free Church periods are often the only complete source for people who died before the Daily World started giving full coverage. If the person you're researching died in a rural area outside Aberdeen city, the newspaper may not have carried the obituary at all, or may have run only a brief notice in a regional edition. I tend to work in two-hour blocks with breaks in between because the material is dense and repetitive, and your attention drifts after a certain point. Missing a single detail in a death register entry can send you down the wrong branch of a family tree for hours. Take the breaks. The payoff comes when you start seeing patterns — the same families appearing across decades, the same institutions being mentioned in connection with different people, the shifts in language and emphasis that reflect how the city viewed itself at different times. That's when the archive work stops being tedious and starts being genuinely interesting. But getting to that point requires patience and a willingness to deal with bad index entries, wrong spellings, and files that don't match the catalogue description.
