VITAL RECORDS & CENSUSES

SCOTLANDSPEOPLE scotlandspeople.gov.uk

ScotlandsPeople provides access to civil registration records, parish registers, wills, valuation records, and more. A great deal of free information is available on initial searches and you can pay for scans of the originals.

FAMILYSEARCH familysearch.org

FamilySearch hosts two useful Scottish vital records indexes – Scotland Births and Baptisms 1564-1950 and Scotland Marriages 1561-1910. These mainly contain Church of Scotland records prior to 1855 and statutory records from 1856-1874/ 75.

SCOTTISH INDEXES scottishindexes.com

Emma and Graham Maxwell have created Scottish Indexes to provide information from many difficult-to-access record sets held within the National Records of Scotland, including paternity cases and asylum records. The index information is fairly detailed and free and you can pay for the original scans.

OLD SCOTTISH GENEALOGY AND FAMILY HISTORY oldscottish.com/ records.html

The Old Scottish Genealogy and Family History site provides access to free indexes of records, sourced from National Records of Scotland collections. This includes lists of male heads of families as recorded in kirk session minutes following the 1834 Veto Act and illegitimate births as found in parish records.

FREECEN freecen.org.uk

This project is attempting to transcribe every census in Britain from 18411891. While the site has prioritised later censuses for England and Wales, for Scotland there is fairly substantial coverage for the 1841 and 1851 censuses.

SCOTTISH DOCUMENTS scottishdocuments.com

The Church of Scotland kirk session records and those for some nonconformist Presbyterian denominations, provide information about daily parochial events, often naming parishioners. They have been digitised, but the site can only be viewed at participating local Scottish archives.