Why doesn’t Ancestry know I exist?
QWhen I started searching for my birth records, I had a look on ScotlandsPeople, and there I was. Later on, I found my birth listed on ancestry.co.uk, but having checked more than once in the past year, I cannot find my official birth record on the website. I was born in 1939 in Glasgow, the daughter of Godfrey Horace Frank Whant (a sergeant in the Royal Artillery), and Dorothy Smith. Is it me, or is it Ancestry?
Maggie Burton
AIf your details are on Ancestry, it will be through a user-submitted tree, which is bad practice from a privacy perspective. The only website that offers online access to Scottish civil registration records is ScotlandsPeople ( scotlandspeople.gov. uk). The site is run by the National Records of Scotland (NRS), which replaced the General Register Office for Scotland. Even then, an image of your birth record will not be hosted on the website, only an index entry – the NRS operates a closure period of 100 years for such records, for reasons of privacy. You can order a certified copy of the certificate, or you can view a digitised image at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh (see nrscotland.gov.uk/research/visit-us/scotlands people-centre) or at local family history centres throughout Scotland (see nrscotland.gov.uk/ research/local-family-history-centres), where no such restrictions are in place.
Neither Ancestry nor any other vendor has an agreement in place with the NRS to host its records, which is also why only incomplete Scottish census transcripts exist on the site from 1841 to 1901. Ancestry made transcripts of these from microfilm copies some years ago, for which it owns the copyright. It is for this reason also that the 1911 Scottish census is not on Ancestry, which was digitised and not microfilmed by the NRS.
Chris Paton