Gaps in your Border Reiver Family Tree

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Many people that descend from Border Reiver Families hit the same problem while researching their family trees – the dreaded gap.
Getting back beyond the 1700s is sometimes very problematic using the Church records for one very simple and often overlooked hitch.
Hundreds of people from the Reiver families were either banished or killed after King James VI ascended to the English throne in 1603. What isn’t so widely known is how long these banishments were being handed out at the Assizes in Jedburgh and Dumfries. People were still being kicked out of the Borders as late as 1642.
Punishments included being drafted for military service abroad in the Low Countries (Netherlands) or being burned with a branding iron, to hanging, beheading and drowning.
Many of the reivers that were banished simply took to the secluded isolation of the hills of home. They were a pragmatic people, tough and hardened to a rural lifestyle, and mistrustful of officials.
So while many took the option of taking land in Ulster to start a new life during the Plantations, others just vanished into the heather. And a wanted man was unlikely to visit a church to register a birth or a marriage. Why would you give yourself away like that? Plenty of Scotsmen and their families crossed over into Northumberland, or visa versa, others disappearing into the growing cities to gain a degree of anonymity.
You aren’t dealing with normal, law-abiding citizens – you’re researching one of the most violent criminal societies that Britain has ever seen. The Border Reivers – the original mafia.

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