Hello again James.
If you have Scottish Ancestry then this is the site you should familiarise yourself with:
http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ (I note that ev has provided a link to it in her post)
You can search for free, but you have to register and pay for credits to instantly download certificates. Costs are very reasonable but you just need to be a little careful as it is very easy to plough through the credits.
There are plenty of people who can assist you in your Scottish searches if you post a thread on the appropriate Scottish board. In fact if your search is leading you direct to Scotland then this thread could be moved there.
Familysearch is a free site and worth checking as they have decent (though not complete) coverage for Scotland. A link to their Historical Collections (scroll down to see the Scottish records):
https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list#page=1®ion=UNITED_KINGDOM_IRELANDOr for a more general search:
https://familysearch.org/search/collection/igiThere are also some Scottish counties which have very good free online records so well worth trying a google search.
If you are trying to trace your family back, then I would suggest your first port of call should be to download the Duncan McLeod/Mary Rae marriage certificate. This will give you a wealth of information including parent's names. This will also confirm the parent's names given on the Australian death certificates.
Scottish birth and death certificates also give both parent's names so it is not always necessary to purchase all certificates for each family, though some people do so anyway.
With the information from the McLeod/Rae marriage certificate your next step could be to purchase the marriage certificates for
both sets of parents. Then you will have
their parent's names.
Once you get back to 1901 you can try to locate the families on the censuses - useful to find siblings and to confirm relationships, see where they were living and their occupations. There are transcripts of the censuses on the pay sites such as Ancestry, though you might also find some free elsewhere (I have not used these so am unsure if they are complete). You can view the originals on Scotland's People for the cost of a few credits. And SP is the only place you can view the 1911 census (there are no transcriptions of this available).
In your search keep in mind that spellings varied so you need to be flexible and also ages often varied too - people were not so hung up on dates of birth or spellings (in fact you often see variations of spellings within the same document).
Good luck. Let us know if you need further help.
