Tracing your Scottish Family History
If you are thinking about tracing your Scottish Family History then the best place to start is to write down as much information about your family as you can on a piece of paper.
You should include all your relations names and it might be easier to draw a rough family tree starting with yourself at the bottom of the page and then adding your parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents as well as any other relatives you are aware of. This should give you an idea of how much or how little you know about your family. At this stage of your research do not worry if you cannot fill in many of your family’s names as hopefully over the coming weeks and months these gaps will be filled in.
Next try to write down all the information you know about the family members you drew on your family tree. Try to note down their names, date of birth, date of marriage, date of death, occupation, where the lived and any other information you know about them no matter how trivial as these are all clues which you will be able to use to solve the mystery of your Scottish Family History.
The next step in tracing your family history is to speak to as many of your living relatives as you can to find out more information about them and also to see if they can provide you with information about other members of your family that you do not know. If possible try to obtain a copy of any birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates or photographs that your relations may have as these documents really start to bring your Scottish Family History to life.
With all the names, details, certificates and other information you are now able to start to delve further into your family history. However, before you start to spend time researching your ancestry it is worthwhile searching online using Google, Genesreunited, Ancestry and other genealogical websites to see if any of your family has already pulled together a family tree. It is not unusual to find that a distant relation has also become interested in their family and may have built a family tree online or documented your family history. If you do find such a relation online then you should contact them and ask them to send you any information they have on your side of the family tree.
The next step in tracing your Scottish Family History is to actually use the information, certificates and documents that you have managed to obtain to date. Birth, marriage and death certificates all contain lots of valuable information about someone and it is important that you read these carefully to glean as much information as you can from them.
Scottish birth certificates tend to show the name of the child born, the child’s date of birth, the child’s place of birth, the names of the child’s parents, the occupations of the parents, the age of the parents, the date of the parents marriage as well as the name of the informant.
Scottish marriage certificates normally show the name, address, age and occupations of both the bride and groom. The marriage certificate also shows the date and place of the marriage as well as the names of the bride and grooms parents, their occupations, the name of the person who conducted the wedding and the names of witnesses.
Scottish death certificates tend to show the name of the deceased person, the date of death, the place of death, the cause of death, the age of the deceased, the names of the deceased person’s parent, the parents ages, the parents occupations and the name of the informant.
You should use the certificated to fill in any gaps you had on your original first rough family tree and update your notes with the information shown on the certificates. Needless to say that although you will have filled in a few gaps new gaps will have appeared especially concerning ancestors who you may never have heard of before. Genealogy is just like a big jig-saw puzzle and the aim is to find all the relevant pieces and complete the puzzle because over time a lot of the pieces have become lost and the problem you face is how to find them?
The best thing to do in tracing your Scottish family history is to join Scotlandspeople website. Scotlandspeople is the official government source of genealogical information for Scotland and contains almost 80 million Scottish records. These records include birth certificates, marriage certificates and death certificates discussed previously but in addition to these Scotlandspeople also holds Census Records, Old Parish Records, Wills and Testaments, Coats of Arms records and Catholic Parish Records. The oldest record listed on Scotlandspeople dates back to 1513 so it really does provide an excellent database for helping you to trace your Scottish family history.
Joining Scotlandspeople is free as is searching their records unfortunately you do have to pay to actually view the records. You can buy 30 ‘page credits’ for about £6 or roughly 11 US dollars so it is not really expensive and is definitely worth the money for the information you receive. It is significantly cheaper to pop into the Scotlandspeople Centre in Edinburgh but unless you live in Scotland this may not be feasible.
Anyway coming back to tracing your Scottish Family History the next stage to building your family tree is to look at the Certificates and information you have and to use this to build your family tree. The best way of explaining this is through an example so lets say you have the Birth Certificate for a Andrew Macdonald who was born in 1900. On the birth certificate you will also see the name of his parents say William and Margaret along with their ages. To find out more about William and Margret you can enter their details into Scotlandspeople search box and search the marriage records to see if you can obtain their marriage certificate. Similarly by entering their individual details into the Deaths and Births search boxes you can obtain copies of their death and birth certificates which in turn will provide you with details of their parents. You then simply keep repeating the process using the new information to keep going back through your family history.
Sometimes the results might provide several people with the same name in different parts of Scotland and this is where it is important to cross reference your details to ensure you correctly identify your ancestor and not someone else’s who shares the same name.
The Census information on Scotlandspeople can help to narrow down your ancestors and to provide more information on relations. Censuses have been held in Scotland since 1841 although the most recent census available to view is 1901 in order to protect living people’s privacy.
Going back to the Macdonald family example if we entered Andrews information and age into the Census search box we should be able to identify if he has any older brothers and sisters. We will also be able to see the address where he lived, the ages of all members of his family living at the address, their names and occupations which we can then use to build up a more detailed history of his family.
Unfortunately statutory birth, marriage and death certificates were only introduced in 1855 so if you are looking for older information you will need to search the Old Parish Records. These date back to 1538 but contain much less information as these were records kept by the Parish Minister and as there was no standard format the details recorded can vary significantly from one Parish to another.
Another useful source of information for tracing your Scottish family history is Family History Societies which provide genealogical research information covering their area. Members of the Societies may also be able to help you by providing local knowledge about where your ancestors lived and worked. If you are really lucky some members may even be related and be able to provide you with access to their own research.
If you do become stuck remember that there are millions of people worldwide researching their family history and many of these have joined genealogical communities online to support each other and to share information so why not join some of these sites and hopefully trace the roots of your Scottish family history.