These are the Scottish family history resources that I mention in my talks on tracing your Scottish ancestors using the Internet.
The main website for Scottish family history research is ScotlandsPeople. There you can view, save and print images of the Scottish civil registration (vital) records from 1855 to 1908 (births), 1933 (marriages) and 1958 (deaths); the 1841-1901 census returns; baptism and marriage/banns entries from the Old Parish Registers (OPRs); wills and inventories from 1514-1901; and coats of arms from the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland from 1672-1907.
The OPR entries extend from 1553 (for the parish of Errol in Perthshire) – although many registers were not started until much later – until 1854, when the registers were called in. ScotlandsPeople is putting OPR burial entries online too – hopefully, quite soon – although burial records don’t exist for about a third of the Scottish parishes.
You have to pay to view the records on Scotland’s People, or even to search most of the indexes. You pay £6 for a session of 30 credits, which you buy through the website using a credit or debit card. To view each page of search results (up to 25 names) uses up one credit, while viewing the image of a record costs five credits. Each session lasts for 90 consecutive days, but any unused credits are saved until you buy another session.
The £6 charge applies to the civil registration records, census returns and parish register entries, but not to wills or coats of arms. Searching the wills and coats of arms indexes is free of charge. A will or inventory will cost you £5, however long or short it is, and similarly, a coat of arms record will cost you £10.
Scottish Strays Marriage Index
A useful free online source for tracing Scottish ancestors is the Scottish Strays Marriage Index, provided by the Anglo-Scottish Family History Society (a specialist branch of the Manchester & Lancashire Family History Society). The index mainly lists marriages that took place outside Scotland, and where at least one spouse was born in Scotland. A reference number is usually given, so that if you want to make contact with the person who supplied the information, you can do so through the society.
International Genealogical Index
The International Genealogical Index (IGI) on the LDS Family Search website is particularly useful for Scottish research, as almost all baptisms and marriages/banns listed in the OPRs are indexed in the IGI – and it’s free of charge.
The IGI also indexes births and marriages from the Scottish statutory records for the period 1855-1875. In addition, you can carry out a search for all the children of a couple by specifying the forenames and surnames of the parents. On ScotlandsPeople, only the father’s and mother’s surnames can be specified.
Until September 2002, Scots Origins provided access to the GROS records, which are now available through ScotlandsPeople. The Scots Origins site still exists and provides a free place-name search, as well as chargeable transcriptions of OPR (1700-1854), civil registration (1855-1990), and census records (1861 and 1871) through a partnership with the Scottish Roots Ancestral Research Service. Scots Origins also allows you to search on the IGI by parish, which isn’t possible using Family Search.
Another website that lets you search the IGI by parish is that of Hugh Wallis. His site also features an interesting middle-name index, which lets you search for middle names that are probably surnames.
Statistical Accounts of Scotland
You can find a lot of useful background information for the lives of your Scottish ancestors at the website of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which you can view online free of charge. The Statistical Accounts contain descriptions of each of the c.900 Scottish parishes in both the 1790s (the ‘Old’ Account) and the 1830s/1840s (the New Account).
Calling the accounts ‘statistical’ makes them sound dull and dry, but that’s certainly not the case. Written by the local Church of Scotland ministers, the accounts describe the landscape, the people and how they lived. Their authors covered everything from the cost of living to local superstitions and whether the people spoke English, Gaelic or broad Scots.
Scottish archives and libraries
- General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) – has helpful online leaflets and a list of parish registers showing the years covered for baptisms, marriages and burials;
- National Archives of Scotland (NAS) – has many useful online guides to its records, and an online public access catalogue (OPAC), in which you can search for soldiers’ and airmen’s wills (among other records);
- National Library of Scotland (NLS) – Scotland’s main reference library, whose catalogue you can search online;
- Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) – contains an online catalogue for 52 Scottish archives, and (in its Digital Archive) the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society database of 5,000 emigrants to Australia between 1852 and 1857.