How to research a house in Edinburgh
The Register of Sasines reaching back to 1617, ScotlandsPeople, Historic Environment Scotland's listed buildings, the valuation rolls, and the National Records of Scotland — why a New Town flat or an Old Town tenement is unusually traceable.
By The Plot Team · May 22, 2026 · 4 min read
Scotland keeps its own property and family records, separate from England's, and Edinburgh — a UNESCO World Heritage city of Georgian New Town terraces and towering Old Town tenements — is where that distinctively Scottish system shines. In one respect Edinburgh beats almost anywhere in the UK: its ownership record reaches back to 1617. Here's how to trace a house in Scotland's capital.
Ownership: the Register of Sasines
Scotland's great gift to house history is the General Register of Sasines, a public register of property deeds running continuously from 1617 — one of the oldest such registers in the world. A "sasine" recorded the transfer of land ownership, and for an Edinburgh property the Sasines can carry the chain of owners back centuries, far deeper than England's online record reaches. The register is kept by Registers of Scotland; the modern Land Register is gradually replacing it. It's not a free bulk feed — you search and pay per extract, and older searches are done through the search sheets and county indexes — but the depth available is exceptional. For a New Town house, the Sasines can name the original feuar (the holder of the feu, Scotland's characteristic form of tenure) who built on the plot.
The people: ScotlandsPeople
Scotland's census, civil registration, and church records are consolidated on one official government site: ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk). It holds the censuses 1841–1921, statutory births, marriages, and deaths from 1855, and the Old Parish Registers of the Church of Scotland reaching back to the 1500s and 1600s. It's pay-per-credit rather than free, but it's authoritative and indexed, and it's a single front door to records that in England are scattered across several providers. Search by name, then by address within the census, to people your Edinburgh house decade by decade.
Valuation rolls: the annual occupancy record
A Scottish speciality worth knowing: the valuation rolls, compiled annually from 1855, list every property's owner, tenant, and occupier with its rental value — effectively a yearly snapshot of who held and who lived in each house. They're on ScotlandsPeople, and because they're annual (not once a decade like the census), they're superb for tracking the comings and goings at a specific address. For an Edinburgh tenement, where ownership and tenancy could be complex, the valuation rolls are often the clearest record of occupancy.
Listed buildings: Historic Environment Scotland
Edinburgh is densely listed. Historic Environment Scotland maintains the register of listed buildings — Categories A, B, and C — and the New Town and Old Town together form a World Heritage Site, so a great many buildings carry a listing with a description attached. This is the live heritage layer Plot reads for Scottish addresses: where a listed building sits near your address, its Historic Environment Scotland entry and category can surface alongside the page. The Edinburgh World Heritage trust and the city's conservation-area appraisals add further architectural context.
Maps and the archive
For maps, the National Library of Scotland hosts a world-class free, georeferenced collection of historic Ordnance Survey maps — overlay your street and watch the New Town's planned terraces or the Old Town's closes take shape across editions. The NLS holds Edinburgh town plans in extraordinary large-scale detail from the mid-19th century, building by building.
For the deeper, on-site research, the National Records of Scotland and the Edinburgh City Archives hold the documents that pin a house to its origins. Edinburgh's dean of guild court records are a Scottish speciality: until 1975 the dean of guild controlled building work in the burgh, so its records hold the warrants, plans, and petitions for putting up or altering a house — often the closest thing to a dated construction record. Estate and feu-charter papers, and the register of deeds, round out the picture for a New Town terrace built on a feued plot. A note on Edinburgh's housing: most of the city lives in flatted tenements rather than whole houses, so "your house" is usually one flat in a shared stair — the Sasines and the valuation rolls handle this by recording each flat's owner and occupier separately, which is why both records matter so much here.
How Plot helps in Edinburgh
For an Edinburgh address, Plot builds a real page: it geocodes the address, surfaces nearby Historic Environment Scotland listed buildings with their category and description, and gathers Wikimedia imagery and the cross-referenced public record around it. It's honest that Scotland's ownership and family records — the Register of Sasines and ScotlandsPeople — are paid, authoritative systems you'll search yourself, and it points you to them by name. It assembles the open heritage layer in a minute and shows you where four centuries of Scottish record-keeping pick up.