Hi Elizabeth
The IGI site is free. Try
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/default.asp. There are various regional sites so it depends on which part of the country you are searching in. You could Google for these.
If you need to search a particualr parish try:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers/CountryScotland.htmThis extends the ordinary IGI search facility.
Watch how you use the LDS (i.e. IGI) sites as they record entries for religious purposes
not to help us genealogists. There are two types of entry - An
extract which is taken from the Church of Scotland records and is usually fairly accurate
And a
submission which is an informed guess about dates/parents/places and has not been checked for accuracy.
The records are very useful to check where and when someone was born or married but it is better to follow it up by buying the correct certificate from scotlandspeople. It tells you more anyway!
If it is costing you too much is that because you keep finding the wrong certificates? There are ways to avoid some of the incorrect searches. Look for the guidance on RootsChat and TalkingScot as well as scotlandspeople. Learn how to use wildcards in a search and where the different parishes are.
We all had to learn the hard (expensive) way and that's what RootsChat is about. Learning from each other.
Russell
