Scottish ancestry – The Nosey Genealogist's: Help Me With My Family Tree

This week saw the relaunch of ScotlandsPeople website under its new operators, CACI. For years it had been run for the Scottish Government by the people behind FindMyPast, but they relinquished their franchise and this week saw the new site appear, albeit a little later than expected.

The top genealogy website for tracing your Scottish ancestors because it contains millions of documents held by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) – now boasts an enhanced search facility and new user interface that is designed from the start to be accessible on a range of devices.

There has been a slight increase in the price of purchasing pay-per-view credits from £7 to £7.50 for 30 credits, but users are no longer charged for accessing statutory index entries to birth, marriage, death, Old Parish Register and Open Census records.

If, like me you had been a previous user then, all credits, saved images and searches from the old version of the website are still be available to users once you log into the new platform.

I have spent a profitable time this weekend searching out some of my Scots forebears in the Old Parish Records, finding a number of my ancestors in 18th century Fife. I was particularly pleased to find a marriage in 1719 in the parish of Wemyss that looks like it could be relevant for my maternal family tree.

Family Tree on a computer

If you have any Scottish ancestry then now is a good time to take a look at the records on this website: www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk

The ScotlandsPeople website is the official Scottish Government site for searching government records and archives and is used by hundreds of thousands of people each year to apply for copies of official certificates and to research family history, biography, local history and social history.

You may also be interested in this book…

This fully revised second edition of Ian Maxwell’s Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors is a lively and accessible introduction to Scotland’s long, complex and fascinating story. It is aimed primarily at family historians who are eager to explore and understand the world in which their ancestors lived.

He guides readers through the wealth of material available to researchers in Scotland and abroad. He looks at every aspect of Scottish history and at all the relevant resources. As well as covering records held at the National Archives of Scotland, he examines closely the information held at local archives throughout the country. He also describes the extensive Scottish records that are now available on line.

His expert and up-to-date survey is a valuable handbook for anyone who is researching Scottish history because he explains how the archive material can be used and where it can be found. For family historians, it is essential reading as it puts their research into a historical perspective, giving them a better insight into the part their ancestors played in the past.

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If you have Scottish ancestry and begin to trace your family history from that country, then you will rapidly discover that it is quite different in many ways from tracing your forebears elsewhere.

Some years back I began to look into a side of my family that was from Scotland, although at the time I had no idea which part they came from. Quickly, I found, some of their roots were in Midlothian and also in the City of Edinburgh where they appeared to be merchants.

Following them further back in time I found that they were descendants of the lairds of Hope, an estate in the hills to the south of Edinburgh. To my delight, I found the first laird of Hopes marriage in the Scotlandspeople records for Kirk of Halyroodhous (sic), Edinburgh in 4 August 1664. I then discovered a privately published book about the family in the Society of Genealogists Library in London and this gave me a line of ancestors to follow on a visit to Scotland.

As I have been thinking about doing more research on this branch of the family I was, therefore, very happy to recently get my hands on the book by Alan Stewart called Tracing Your Edinburgh Ancestors published by Pen & Sword.

I learnt a huge amount about the local history of Edinburgh from this book, as well as discovering where to look for records pertaining to the City and its villages. Alan Stewart combines a great deal of the ancient history of the area as well as modern historical information and the all important genealogical data and where to look for it.

Part one of the book explains the history of Edinburgh from the volcanic activity, that is responsible for its geography, through the Ice Age and the Romans to the setting out of the Old Town and the New Town. From reading this book I now understand the way Edinburgh spread and how it incorporated Leith and the surrounding villages into its borders.

From the second part of the book I was able to build my understanding of the family history records, that can be used to trace ancestors from the area. The explanations of the differences in them, when compared to their English and Welsh counterparts, clarified a great deal for me. Out of the chapters, in part two, I would just like to highlight how useful I found the sections on wills and inheritance records, to make sense of my own research into my Edinburgh folk. Now I understand what a Sasine record was. I had previously seen mentioned, in the privately published family history book I had found in the Society of Genealogist Library, that one of my ancestors, Edmund Hay of Hopes, obtained his lands in 1653 from his father according to a sasine dated that year. Alan Stewart’s book has made it clear what this is and that they have been digitised and are available to view on “virtual volumes” at the National Records of Scotland.

Tracing Your Edinburgh Ancestors by Alan Stewart has much more to recommend it to the researcher of Edinburgh family. It is available as a paperback, a kindle book or an ePub book


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The ScotlandsPeople website relaunched

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