Getting to the Roots of Your Family - RootsWeb - Ancestry.com

INTRODUCTION
PATRON CLASS HANDOUT
Best Websites for Scottish Research
Scotland has indexed all of its major genealogical record collections and made the indexes – and
images of the records – available online at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. This is a fee-based web
site, costing £8 (about $12) for 30 page credits and accessible for 365 consecutive days. For the
amount of information you can obtain, it is a great savings over sending to Scotland for records.
The major genealogical record types for Scotland are:
• Civil registration (government vital records)
• Census records
• Church records
• Land and probate records.
These are the records most likely to provide names, dates, places, and relationships.
STEPS FOR USING SCOTLANDSPEOPLE
1. First, click on ‘Register’ and do so; you must have an email account.
2. As part of registration, create yourself a ‘username,’ and ScotlandsPeople will assign you a
password and send it to your email account.
3. Log in to the web site with your username and password. (Through ‘My Details,’ you may
change the password to something easier to remember.)
4. Select the type of record you wish to search.
5. Enter a name to search for and a time period.
6. Narrow the search to a particular county and/or parish/town if you wish. [Note: This site allows
you to search up to five (only) counties/parishes at a time.]
7. Click on Search. If the search finds too many matches, narrow the search further until you have
one page of matches.
8. Click the ‘View’ button. Each page of matches will cost you 1 page credit to view.
9. Now you will be asked to buy page credits. You can buy as few as 30 for £6 or as many as 300
for £60. Payment is by credit card. Click on the ‘Purchase’ button.
10. Once you have paid to view the search matches, you can pick the record image you want to
view. This will cost you 5 page credits per image.
11. Once you have viewed an image, you may print a copy.
12. Once you have viewed a page of search matches or an image, they are stored in your account
and you never have to pay to view them again. You can view them again by clicking on
‘Viewed Images’ or ‘Previous Searches.’
CIVIL REGISTRATION RECORDS
Scottish government registration of births, marriages, and deaths began in 1855.
Indexes and printable images of records are available on ScotlandsPeople (100-yr restriction on
images of births, 75 of marriages, and 50 of deaths). The Family History Library (FHL) has the
indexes to 1956 and some records (1855-1875, 1881, and 1891) on microfilm. But if you are used to
ordering microfilms through a family history center, the web site might be the more economic way to
obtain copies of the records. However, as far as an index from 1855-1875 for births and deaths the
Historical Records database on www.familysearch.org is free and cannot be beat.
Scottish civil records supply the most information of any in the British Isles:
• Birth records can give the parents’ wedding date and place in additional to the traditional
information you would expect to find in the records.