Scotland's People, Ancestry, FamilySearch etc: which to use?

[lestree]

Quite often, in this forum, I see something along the lines of, "I've searched Ancestry and can't find ...." or "I've tried Ancestry and Scotland's People ...."

There is a fundamental, major, difference between Scotland's People on the one hand and Ancestry, Family Search, Find My Past, Genes Reunited, MyHeritage, Geni and 1001 other genealogy sites out there on the Internet.

The critical difference is that Scotland's People is the ***only*** source of  the originals of the principal building blocks of a Scottish family tree.

Each of Ancestry, Family Search and Find My Past has a wonderful range of resources for finding out more about individuals and turning a family tree into a family history, but the tree has first to be constructed using the original data.

By all means use these other sites as a finding aid.

For example Family Search has the International Genealogical Index https://familysearch.org/search/collection/igi to births, baptisms, banns and marriages in Scotland until about 1874/5. Even so, the IGI is not complete, and the Community Contributed listings contain some very dubious information alongside the useful stuff. (If you don't believe this, try putting 'Odin' as the given name, 'Any Event' in 'Norway', from '0000' to '0900', and see what you get.)

Ancestry has one useful finding aid for constructing Scottish family trees, and that is the transcriptions of the census. However these are notorious for their inaccuracies; you cannot rely on them, so it is always necessary to check the originals, which are only available online at Scotland's People. (There are much more reliable transcriptions at FreeCEN http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl but so far the coverage in FreeCEN is only a small proportion of the available records.)

Scotland's People has digital images of the following original documents
- the surviving baptism and marriage registers of the Church of Scotland from the 16th century to 1854
- the statutory civil registers of births, marriages and death from 1855 to the present day (though there are restrictions on what you can view online: you cannot view births less than 100 years ago, marriages less than 75 years ago and deaths less than 50 years ago)
- the decennial censuses from 1841 until 100 years ago
- the baptism, marriage and death registers of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland
- almost all wills from the earliest times until 1925
- a selection of valuation rolls from the 19th and early 20th century

The Church of Scotland registers and the 1841 to 1901 censuses can be viewed on microfilm in public libraries, archives and family history centres in Scotland, or by arranging to rent the relevant film in any of the family history centres run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon Church). The latter also has microfiche of the statutory civil birth and marriage registers from 1866 to 1874/5.

I will mention only fleetingly the family trees you find on all these sites. Some are no doubt meticulously researched, but others are a load of rubbish. I have found trees where people were still having children years after they were dead and buried, and it's very common to find that someone has found only one candidate in the records who roughly fits their ancestor, so they hav assumed this must be the right one.

Digression - only yesterday I found a tree in which my 2nd great-uncle, who was born, married, brought up 10 of a family, was given a retirement award for 40 years' work and eventually died, all in Banffshire, allegedly had a second family (with birth dates overlapping those of the genuine family) and died in Australia. I am sure his wife (who also spent her entire life in Banffshire, and survived her husband) would have been astonished to learn of his double life several months' travel away on the other side of the world.

Then there is the story of Mary Simpson. www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=619657

So please, everyone, disabuse yourselves of the idea that you can properly build an accurate family tree without using Scotland's People. Unless your ancestors left Scotland before the early 19th century and you are prepared to go all over the place to access information on microfilm, it is simply not possible, and certainly not by using Ancestry etc alone.

[Forfarian]

I guess I’ll need to double back on people I’m missing and try to see if somebody fits year wise rather than solely looking for listings with the mother’s maiden name. Would explain why I can’t find them.

Until the Covid pandemic, mothers' maiden surnames were only indexed for births from 1929 onwards, but during the pandemic large numbers of mothers' maiden surnames were added to the index. I believe the project to add mothers' maiden surnames to all post-1855 births in the index is continuing.

This explains why scottishlad failed to find the birth he was originally looking for.

I note with interest that his Agnes McKenzie's mother's maiden surname is one of those yet to be added to the index.

[scottishlad]

MCKENZIE
ISAAC
TENNON
HARRIET
1855
644 / 1 / 256
GLASGOW CENTRAL DISTRICT

The above 1855 marriage will be full of useful info. which is not recorded in any other year.

It was the beginning of Statutory records & a gold mine for Genealogists, well worth the cost & more.

When looking for people, if you fail to bring up matches it's an idea to use different options for names & the 'wildcard' option which uses an asterisk e.g. M*ckenzie which will bring up both Mac & Mc.

Searches are not case sensitive.

Annie

Thank you! Yes I have that document and there is much to learn from it. Particularly Harriet’s father. On her death certificate there are no parents listed. Just a line through that section. She died from being hit by a train, so perhaps nobody there to act as informant given gruesome nature of death? Not sure. However the marriage certificate listed her father, John. Thanks for the reply!

[runmerry]

It's as well to remember our ancestors were capable of lying through their teeth, making up what they didn't know or twisting information to make themselves look good.
I speak from experience as I have come across all of these in some of my searches so I try to find more than one source of information.

Regards
Jen

[Forfarian]

Yes, that is true.

Hence my signature line.