so you are saying there will be no written
certificates or such like
There are no such things as birth, marriage or death certificates until the start of statutory civil registration in 1855.
Before that, the main records are the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) which are the written records kept by the Church of Scotland of baptisms and proclamations of banns of marriage. The originals of all of these, plus the surviving Roman Catholic registers of baptisms and marriages, can be viewed online at
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, which is pay-per-view but modestly priced.
The quality of the information is very variable, and the registers are incomplete for a variety of reasons. The further back you go, the more people are simply missing from the records altogether.
The IGI International Genealogical Index (Community indexed) is a useful index to what surviving records there are, but it is neither 100% complete not 100% accurate. Beware of the Community Contributed section of the IGI, which contains, along with lots of useful pointers, some information which is at best dubious and at worst complete fantasy.
