Visual Introduction to ScotlandsPeople
Contents
Work in progress ..
Introduction to 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.
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?
How will I find it?
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 ....
An initial search of the Old Parish Register Births and Baptisms using the surnames gives a result, but it is not the correct person.
A second search, putting the parents' first names in the surname boxes, gives different but still incorrect results.
Using variant spellings of both surnames still gives no results ....
