March 2004

Find your ancestors in the click of a mouse

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by Duncan Macniven

Technology has revolutionised genealogical research. No one knows this better than Duncan Macniven, Registrar General for Scotland. Here he gives a glimpse of the far-reaching effects the internet has had on accessing records and of the exciting plans for the future.

Find your ancestors in the click of a mouse

There are about 40 million people world-wide who share a Scottish ancestry. Many of them are keen to know more about their Scottish ancestry. So it is no surprise that Scotland is a world-leader in providing family history information on the internet.

We are in that happy position partly because our written records go back a long way. The main examples are registers of births, marriages and deaths to 1553, Census records to 1841 and wills to 1500. But it is also thanks to the devolved government of Scotland, and funding bodies such as the British lottery, which have paid for the digitisation of many key records, so that they can be made more widely available.

The General Register Office for Scotland, which I head, has the (mostly pleasant) task of registering births, marriages and deaths and running the Census. So we have many records which are vital for genealogists. For privacy reasons, we restrict access to some information. Census records, for example, are kept confidential for 100 years. But an important part of our work has always been to make our historic records publicly available. Before 1998, that meant a trip to Edinburgh, where we are based, to look at paper, microfiche or microfilm. In 1998, however, we set up our pay-per-view genealogical website – thus becoming, so far as we can tell, the first government department in Britain to do our business over the internet. Our website initially gave access to the indexes to our records and then, as digitisation proceeded, to the records themselves. We now have around 40 million individual records available on the web and, when our digitisation programme finishes in the summer, we will be adding millions more.

The website address is www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk For £6 (or about US$11.50) you can buy 30 “page credits” – which, unless your family has a very common name, could allow you to start from your pre-1900 Scottish grandparents’ date of birth and trace the date of birth of 4 of your great-grandparents. And the site offers free help on how to trace your roots.

Not surprisingly, our website is very popular. As I write this article, people have bought 277,000 accesses to the site over the last year. We have registered almost 120,000 regular users, of whom 16% come from the US, 13% from Australia and New Zealand and 9% from Canada. The number of visitors is progressively increasing as more people get to know the site, and as more documents are available. The number of credits bought in February 2004 was two thirds higher than the same month in 2003. The internet allows us to tap into a new and expanding market – though the number of people who visit us to search our records has fallen, the reduction is less than 10%.

But we are not resting on our laurels. I have formed a partnership with the two other Scottish public servants whose work is most important to Scottish genealogists – the Keeper of the Archives (who holds the nation’s historical records) and the Lord Lyon (who registers all coats of arms in Scotland). Together, we are working to provide a Scottish Family History Research Service, with 3 components. First, since we share accommodation in 2 adjacent buildings in the heart of historic Edinburgh, we will be providing a single front door to the key records held by all 3 partners. No longer will people have to know exactly what records are held by which body. Second, we are working to unify our websites, to give the same “single front door” on the internet. Third, we are encouraging the development of local family history centres in different parts of Scotland, to make it easier for people living in or visiting their ancestor’s homes to get access to our records and other important records held locally.

Let me end with a comment from an amateur family historian:

“Hi,

It is rare that I feel the need to make the effort to give positive feedback but here goes. . . . I think your website is absolutely wonderful, easy to use, and gives so much more detailed information than any other website, at very reasonable prices. I dread seeing evidence of my relatives coming from England or Ireland (apart from the fact that I'm obviously not as Scottish as I thought), because I can't find any site for those countries that offers anything close to what you do. I very much look forward to the developments promised for 2004.”

Published March 2004. Featured content correct at date of publication.

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