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  1. #1

    Default Scotlands People

    Scotlands People (SP) is the on-line site for records held by the National Records of Scotland. You must register to use most of the site. Access to the detailed indexes is free but to see the images of records you must buy credits in groups of 30, and how many you use per record depends on what sort of record it is. An image of a certificate or census page is 6 credits, a Valuation Roll entry is 2 credits, wills and testaments cost 10 credits (no matter how many pages are involved, etc. There's a link to list of charges on the front page.

    A lot of the information (e.g. census) is available elsewhere in the form of transcriptions. The only free site is the IGI on the Familysearch website, which contains transcriptions of the indexes to the Old Parochial Registers (OPR) and BMDs from 1855-1875. Some of the transcription is a little eccentric. Fee-paying sites such as Ancestry and Find My Past also have some transcriptions, especially the various census returns.
    Actual images of the entries are only available for viewing or download on SP, which is a bit simpler than it was before the last (major) update..

    Births and/or Baptisms, Banns and/or Marriages and Deaths & Burials (where they exist) from the OPR are available as index and images between 1538-1854. I've given a review of what you can expect HERE
    You are offered a choice between Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic and Other Churches. Depending on the whim of the local Minister, "Other" registers are the least complete, but their entries are sometimes included in the CoS parish registers.

    The BMD indexes are available from 1855-2012, but images of certificates referring to possibly living people are not, so each type of certificate has a cutoff date that advances each year. The delay before publication is 100 years for births, 75 for marriages and 50 for deaths. In 2013, the cutoff years are B – 1912, M- 1937, D – 1962. See HERE for more details.
    Civil Partnerships are included in the index from 2005, and dissolutions of such partnerships from 2007.

    The Register of Corrected Entries (RCE) is available from 1855-1961. If an entry on the page you’re looking at has been corrected, an option to see it will appear on-screen. Remember that there’s normally 3 entries per page, it may not be yours that’s been corrected.

    All published census (1841-1911) as index and images.

    The following 3 are now under the general heading "Legal records:"

    1: Wills & Testaments from 1513-1925 as index and images. Remember that these are handwritten and get harder to read as you go back in time. Use of the index is free, and you can find out what information is there before buying the pages. This section now includes soldiers'and airmen's wills.

    2: Military Service Appeals Tribunal. These are the records of the appeals of men against their conscription in 1916. Some are more informative than others.

    3: Coats of Arms (CoA) 1672-1913 index and images. Do remember that in Scotland, CoAs are specific to a particular person – if someone found a CoA for Kermit MacMuppet, he would not be able to use it just because he had the same name.
    Clan badges are another matter, they can be worn by anyone claiming membership. These can be found via the Rampant Scotland website HERE.

    The Valuation Rolls are now beginning to appear. 1865, 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935 and 1940 are now on site. I’ve described them further in message #2 HERE
    The SP search engine. The search engine has been improved, and you can now choose whether you want to search on an exact spelling, or one of a range of variations. Wild cards are very useful. Under “exact spelling”, it will only return surnames that exactly correspond to what you fed it. Thus, if you ask for MacMuppet, that's what you'll get. If you use a wild card, as in M*cMuppet, it'll also return McMuppet. (The computer reads the * as "any other letter(s) or none"). Bald will return Baldy, Baldie, Baldwe etc if you select "names that begin with" from the dropdown menu. You do have to be careful with this option or you'll get more than you expect - Rob* would deliver Robertson, Roberts, Robins, Robart, etc etc - so try and pin down as many letters as possible.

    And remember that pre WW1, spelling of names was a fuzzy thing in Scotland. A name can equally end in ..ay, ..ey or ..ie, for example. Or begin with Mc or Mac.

    Scotlands People also has a large area that is free to use, and is invaluable. It is under the “Help and Guidance” tab on their front page, and is divided in 2 sections - Record Guides and Topics.. "Topics" contains all sorts of goodies including lists of occupations, units of money and measurement, a glossary, etc. There’s a also a link to help with the early handwriting. "Topics"has descriptions of the assorted records.
    Last edited by Lesley Robertson; 12-06-2019 at 8:33 AM. Reason: update after passage of years

  2. #2

    Default

    Scotlands People now have Soldiers' Wills available on their site. The good news is that you can see the result of your search free, the bad news is that it costs 10 credits (to view) or 2 pounds 50p (to buy) to see the actual will. You do have to register to use SP.

    It covers 1874-1964, but most of them are from WW1. Apparently there's about 5,000 from WW2.

    I've looked at one of the lads from my One Place Study. The will is very simple - just that he leaves everything to one person with the address of that person.

    Printing was fiddly - I got the best result by copying the image on screen and posting it into my text editor.

  3. #3

    Default

    Over the middle weeks of September 2016, Scotlands People has been completely revamped. Any credits, images or searches that you had stored will still be there (mine are, I've checked). I had to try to get the system to recognise me several times (presumably because everyone else was also trying), once it admitted that it knew me, they asked for a new password.

    There are a couple of very nice new features. For example, you no longer have to pay for the preliminary search results table, just the images. To try it, I searched on Parish registers, deaths, * for surname and the parish name, and got all of them!
    I'll modify this thread when I've had a chance to try everything all out.

  4. #4

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    I've now updated the main description of the reorganised Scotlands People site in message 1.
    I've tried most of the features, but it's so big that I could easily have missed something. Please let me know if you find something that needs modification or inclusion.

  5. #5

    Default

    Scotlands People now has a very useful section summarizing all of their free-to-use material HERE.

    You can consult their BMD index from 1855 ro the present day (it seems to take about 3 months for new entries to be added. Of course, they charge for scans of the certificates and there are limitations on how old they can be - B (100 years), M (75 years, Deaths (50 years).

    They say that the 1921 census will be released in 2021.

    Among the new categories available here are:

    Highland and Island Emigration Society records
    An image library

    In the index to the statutory registers, they now include:
    Overseas BMDs
    Divorces (from 1984)

  6. #6

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    I missed it earlier because I was clearing my office (building's been sold), but I see that Scotlands People have announced the release of their first batch of Prison Registers. This batch is for Perth Prison in 1867-1879 and 1888-1921 The search is on the same basis as other official records - you can search and see index entries for free, but must pay a small fee to see the actual pages.
    There's a article about it HERE. The samples they show seem to contain a reasonable amount of info. The sample shown in the article includes a couple of suffragettes.

  7. #7

    Default

    I don't seem to have mentioned a very useful section that has appeared on Scotlands People. It's called "Virtual Volumes" and (as they say) "you can view digital copies of historical records in the care of National Records of Scotland that are not indexed by personal name. Records currently available are mainly those of kirk sessions and other church courts". It's HERE.. Like the BMDs, you can search and see the index without being logged in, but if you want to see the data you must be registered. OTOH, it allowed me to see pages from Kirk Sessions without spending my credits...

  8. #8

    Default

    I'm having a long-overdue detailed wander around the Scotlands People site and have noted that they have added some very useful links to the page on what records are on the site HERE. For example, there's a section on special categories of records which includes photos, maps and Cabinet Records. Also a list showing when different types of records began, with links to many of their sections.

    Of course, it must be remembered that survival of very old records can be poor thanks to assorted reasons including damp, fire, low quality materials and war (civil and international).

  9. #9

    Default

    The good news is that Scotlands People now also has the 1921 census for Scotland online HERE. As with everything else on SP is that the index (which gives you superficial data - name, age, registration district and county) is free (but you must be a registered user) and you can save pdfs of the search results list to your own computer. You pay the usual 6 credits to see the page (actually a spread across 2 pages) and, interestingly, get an option to order a certificate. I bravely clicked on the latter option, which took it to my basket with a price of 12 pounds! Needless to say, I cancelled it and printed the 6-credit view to pdf.

    The bad news is that there's been quite a lot of complaints about the (recently "upgraded") search engine. It was working really well before, but people I trust have been complaining, so I decided to check using my paternal grandfather's parents and brothers. It took me about 30 minutes to find them (I have their BMDs, etc so knew exactly what I was looking for). The system asks for the person you are looking for plus one other name - I found them when I used the 2 older brothers, not with the names of either parent or when I gave middle names.

    One good results clue is the column on the index page headed REF. This is the code for the target person. People living in the same household should have the first 2 of the 3 numbers matching. For example mother and daughter from a single family both have 282/224 (the county and district numbers). The third number is the individual person, so this page had 282/224/16 and 282/224/17. If the first 2 numbers don't match, those individuals were not sleeping in the same place when registered on census night.

    It took patience to find my (well-known) folk. Hopefully SP are dealing with the torrent of complaints they're apparently getting. My folk had an address I didn't know about, and my grandfather had not opened his sweetshop - credits not wasted!

    This was the first census after WW1, so it's interesting to see who came home from the War. I've just pdf-ed all the index pages for my OPS (I searched on county and parish, but no individual names). While I wait for them to sort out the search engine, I'll compare the apparently missing people against the CWGC for deaths, and then I'll search for the missing people when I can do so without wasting my credits.

    Enjoy!

  10. #10

    Default

    An update to the SP problems since they "improved" their search engine. I've seen a number of comments about middle names - often it seems to be ignoring them if they're included in a search. I had a look at this (using well-known people) and my GGran's brother turned up when I used his middle initial, but with the full middle name he vanished into what looked like a collection of all men of the right age with that forename & family name!

    Some things have already been corrected, so they're obviously working on it.

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