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Scotland / Re:McBean/Fraser/McGlashan, etc: which to use?
« on: Monday 14 August 23 03:41 BST (UK) »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.