Tracing Police Ancestors

Police records are an excellent source for tracing ancestors. Registers confirm names of officers and dates of appointment and retirement, while personnel files can contain a wide variety of valuable information, such as details of parents and siblings, home address, physical description (and sometimes a photograph) and career details. Unfortunately, not all of these types of records have survived, so gaps may exist in some constabularies at some times.

If you are looking for an ancestor who was employed by Strathclyde Police or one of its former constabularies and retired before 1985, you need to contact Glasgow City Council Archives. All Strathclyde Police archives are deposited with the City Archives so that they can be managed and cared for in the best possible way. The City Council Archivists can help and guide you in your research. Further information can be found on Glasgow City Council website (www.glasgow.gov.uk).

The City Archivists will ask you for as much information as possible. If you can provide details, such as full name (spelling is important), date of birth, which constabulary served with, where lived, date of joining (era), number etc, it can make a search much quicker and more accurate.

Strathclyde Police has a duty to protect the privacy of our current and former employees. For this reason, there are some rules that have to be applied before files are released. They are:

• Records of police officers who joined over 75 years ago are open to the general public without reference to the Force.
• Records of police officers who joined less than 75 years ago are not on open access. This means that, if your ancestor falls into this category, you will have to seek permission to view files from Strathclyde Police. The Force cannot consider requests to view these files until a copy of the officer’s death certificate and proof of your relationship to the officer is received. Thereafter, the Force may authorise full or partial access to the information. We also need the enquirer to have first confirmed with the City Archives that records do exist.

We cannot give out personal details or allow access to files for living former officers to anyone other than that officer. For that reason, we cannot help with reunions or enquirers seeking to contact family members and friends. Similarly, we cannot help trace ancestors or friends who were not police officers.

Records of civilian and force support staff have not survived as well as those of police officers.