Visual Introduction to ScotlandsPeople

Introduction to ScotlandsPeople

ScotlandsPeople

There are detailed FAQs, Help and descriptions of what is available on this site, but the examples below may help you to find your way around the site.

Home Page

You can see from the front page what searches are possible. You can search and explore the site without having to pay anything until you need to view the images.

Charges

It is possible to waste a great deal of money in searching for these records, but if you use the site in conjunction with the IGI on FamilySearchand the census indexes on Ancestry, you can narrow down the possibilities considerably, especially when searching for a common surname in Glasgow.

Although the initial outlay seems expensive, in fact it works out as very reasonable when you consider the information which you can receive immediately without the wait for the postman for English certificates and the distinct possibility of having sent for the wrong one!!

Any search you make will be saved and you can refer back to these at any time, viewing images which you have already paid for as many times as you wish, or looking at them when funds permit.

Example of saved searches

Example of images which have been viewed and those yet to be investigated

What will I find?

Record Types & Examples

Old Parish Registers Indexes

Statutory Registers Indexes

Census Indexes

A Case Study: The Simpsons

I knew that my Great Grandmother, Catherine Gray Simpson, was born in Scotland and that her father had brought the family down to London, but I didn’t know when and I didn’t know where in Scotland they had come from. I knew the name of her father from her marriage certificate but nothing else about her family.

Although I knew she was married by then, a search of the 1901 census on [www.ancestry.co.uk Ancestry] gave me a possible family to look at:

I found the same family in 1891 and Catherine was with them. As none of the other Catherine Simpsons born in Scotland were the right age, and I knew that Catherine’s husband, William Bradley, worked as a glass decorator and later founded a glass decorating factory, I was fairly sure I had found the correct family.

They didn’t appear in the 1881 census for England and the 1881 census for Scotland does not appear on the [www.familysearch.org FamilySearch], so I turned to [www.Scotlandspeople.gov.uk ScotlandsPeople] and searched Census 1881

Now that I knew where Catherine was born, I was able to search for her birth.

She was born after 1855, so I searched the Statutory Registers for Births 1855-1906

This gave me the information I needed to find her parents’ marriage so I searched Statutory Registers Marriages 1855-1931

From this search I was able to send for an extract of the certificate, although I could just have saved the image.

From the certificate, I found that James was a widower. Searching 1871 Census I found that James was at home with his parents, and already a widower.

More out of interest than anything else, a trawl of the Statutory Registers Marriages 1855-1931 gave me his first marriage (the practice of including both parent’s names confirmed that I had found the correct one) and a search of the Statutory Registers Deaths 1855-1956 gave me the death of his first wife. Isabella Chalmers had married James in April 1868 and had died in August 1868.

I decided to track James further back as I had found his parent’s names.

In 1861 the family were still in Glasgow.

 to be continued ...

Searching for a birth (unsuccessfully) before 1855

Searching for births before 1855 is often a matter of luck as the birth may not have been recorded but you can search in a variety of ways.

From the death certificate of David Simpson, we know that he was born in about 1813 and that his parents were given as Alexander Simpson and Janet Rae. Rae (Ray) appears as the second name of their son and later grandson.

A search on the IGI gives a son born to these names, but this is Alexander who was born in ....