How to find children of a couple on ScotlandsPeople?

[johnkingedinburgh]

I only started researching my family history a couple of weeks ago.  I didn't know any of my dad's family but I now have a list of his 5 brothers/sisters birth/death/marriage dates as well as his own previous marriages and my 3 half sisters, and have arranged to meet with one of my half sisters for the first time next month! 

I'm happy with my progress

My dad was the youngest and born in 1909 so the 1901/1911 census were invaluable in finding his brothers and sisters. 

However now I've hit a bit of a brick wall! 

I want to track down the children of my dad's brothers and sisters.  Obviously I've got a couple of them who have registered the death of one of their parents, but as for the remainder - I've no idea where to start. 

All I have is the surname (and their parents names via marriage certificate - but seems to be no way to search on that).  I can only take a guess on where they might have been living, so over the period I'm looking at there are 10,000+ possible matches!  That's a lot of shift+clicking! 

Are there any tricks I've missed?

[Ann Baker]

Hi John

the bad news is that after 1910 you can't view the images of birth records on Scotland's People online so you have no way of confirming the parents as you can with the images you can view. However if you can get to Edinburgh or Glasgow easily you can for a daily fee see these records either at the Scotland's People centre in Edinburgh or the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.

The alternative is that you book an hour at a local Scottish registrar's for £10 (you need to book and they don't all do it) and they will do it for you.

You won't get copies of the images from eiother option but you can transcribe them.

Ann

[Douglas P]

Though modern death certs are not online, the indexes are. For married women you can enter both the maiden and married surnames into the search. For the more modern death records, the mother's maiden name is included in the index which also helps to narrow down the results.

Once you've found a possible death in the index you still may not know if this person was born at the wrong end of the country or had their maiden/married names the wrong way around. You can then look for a birth or marriage to check how likely this is to be your family.

By playing around with the search criteria you can find out quite a lot before paying for a search. Don't forget that a search costs the same whether it returns 1 or 25 results. Adjust the search to return the most useful set of results before using up credits.

If someone died in the last few years you could look on the internet for an announcement from the local paper. If you have a date of birth, marriage or death from the Glasgow area up to 1990 you can browse the announcements in the Glasgow Herald for a few days after. Ancestry have a selection of old phone books which can be of limited use with following families. There are also www.deceasedonline.com, www.findagrave.com & www.gravestonephotos.com.

[MonicaL]

Douglas P, that is great advice for anyone trying to do what johnkingedinburgh is trying to do. It is so hard to work into this period due to lack of online information due to data protection.

You would be surprised by how the connections can be made with descendants, so might help to just add some info to your post here as people may recognise some of the names (maybe not immediate connections, but old posts are easily found by google searches these days and brought forward with new responses at any time).

Just because you have Edinburgh in your username...you may not live there or indeed even in Scotland! If you do live in Scotland, and close to one of the main genealogy centres, you can book a day there and view more recent BMDs online (as many as you can whilst there) for the cost of the day access.

Monica 

Added: Just linking to this other post of yours for a little more background www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,614980.0.html

[johnkingedinburgh]

Thanks for the answers folks! 

I grew up in Edinburgh but am currently living in Liverpool.  I spent a couple of hours in the scottish people search room last Friday whilst I was up seeing my mum. 

I was able to track down my half sisters without knowing their names because his marriage and divorce certificates both showed them living in Edinburgh, so at Register House I searched for all the Babies with his surname born in Edinburgh during the period they were married, which brought up around 50 matches, and I quikly shift+clicked on view for each to check each one to check their parents and when I found a match I wrote down the details. 

I then looked up one of them on 192.com to search for their address, googled the postal address and found her email address! 

It's just proving a bit trickier finding siblings of my uncles and aunties since I know nothing about them and they seem to have moved around. 

I did have success however by googling one of their names and found someone else's family tree - which saved a lot of work as they moved to Dorset a couple of years after they were married and moved to Australia before having their children! 

I found another one because he registered the death and gave his connection as son. 

Just a shame you can't search using the mother's maiden name - it would make life a lot simpler! 

It does seem strange that you can't look at the 1921 census, and you can't look at 99 year old birth certificates only (but can pay £12 or go to Register House to look at them) but you can get someone's postal address and list of people at the house from the voters roll on 192.com! 

The 1911 census was invaluable for me as my dad was born in 1909 so I got the name and ages of all his brothers and sisters and was able to track down their birth certificates to get their middle names which made finding wedding and death certificates much easier! 

Just wish they would make later census available. 

[anne_p]

I was curious about my grandmother's only sibling. I had  previously found his marriage and death, but due to the embargo's on an online search, I was unable to look for his children.
I was at the SP centre recently and as an afterthought, I decided to search the records and see what I could find.
Any children would be my father's only cousins, yet whilst I was growing up, no other relative was ever mentioned in his close knit family

I found it all too easy. Children, their marriages and subsequent births were simple to locate. Most of the records that I found relate to living people,  my own age or younger.
I felt extremely uneasy about the whole thing and honestly felt that I was prying. ( I suppose I was)
 As soon as I got home, I shredded all the notes that I had taken without even  looking at them again!

I am still not entirely sure that we should have unlimited  accesss to very recent records.
Am I alone in this thought?

[johnkingedinburgh]

I was curious about my grandmother's only sibling. I had  previously found his marriage and death, but due to the embargo's on an online search, I was unable to look for his children.
I was at the SP centre recently and as an afterthought, I decided to search the records and see what I could find.
Any children would be my father's only cousins, yet whilst I was growing up, no other relative was ever mentioned in his close knit family

I found it all too easy. Children, their marriages and subsequent births were simple to locate. Most of the records that I found relate to living people,  my own age or younger.
I felt extremely uneasy about the whole thing and honestly felt that I was prying. ( I suppose I was)
 As soon as I got home, I shredded all the notes that I had taken without even  looking at them again!

I am still not entirely sure that we should have unlimited  accesss to very recent records.
Am I alone in this thought?

I know what you mean, I felt a bit uneasy reading my dad's divorces last week, then again he was my dad, and I wanted to know more about him. 

[MonicaL]

...and I think that is the crunch. People do research and follow it through to recent (living) people for all sorts of reasons really. Some do it because they can, as the information can be accessible to them and they take great pleasure in trying to make contact with living descendants (nothing wrong with that!). Others do it because they have personal reasons for "needing to know".

Others stop short really of researching to current/living descendants (that is me  ).

I think moving on to living descendants' research is a very personal thing and down to each of us researching how we want to do it really  The main thing though, and the major "health warning" is sometimes we can find information out about living people that we cannot ever discuss with them due to how sensitive the information can be... All fine and good researching events and activities when people are 'well dead', however, not so easy to be so casual about things when people are still living really...

Monica

[johnkingedinburgh]

...and I think that is the crunch. People do research and follow it through to recent (living) people for all sorts of reasons really. Some do it because they can, as the information can be accessible to them and they take great pleasure in trying to make contact with living descendants (nothing wrong with that!). Others do it because they have personal reasons for "needing to know".

Others stop short really of researching to current/living descendants (that is me  ).

I think moving on to living descendants' research is a very personal thing and down to each of us researching how we want to do it really  The main thing though, and the major "health warning" is sometimes we can find information out about living people that we cannot ever discuss with them due to how sensitive the information can be... All fine and good researching events and activities when people are 'well dead', however, not so easy to be so casual about things when people are still living really...

Monica

Very true, we met our half-sisters last week - we'd always been vaguely aware of them but would have had no way of getting in touch with them without having access to birth/marriage certificates and the electoral register.  As it turned out they were as curious about us as we were about them, and possibly the only living people who remember my dad well - and were able to fill in some of each other's blanks. 

On the other hand, my mum is a very proud woman and tells a story of how her dad's mum died young and his father couldn't cope so had him adopted, and how his father was a wealthy man who lived in a huge mansion but my grandad was cheated out of his fortune by rogue lawyers! 

The truth rather more looks like his dad knocked up his servant and though he was a pit manager so probably had a nice house, it had something like 6 windows so hardly a mansion!  And his dad's dad also appeared to have a thing about servants and ended up in an asylum! 

I thought my dad's parents had a bit of a shotgun wedding as their first was born 3 months after they were married, but my mum's parents were married 9 days before their first child was born! 

There are times when she's slagging off my dad's side that we feel like enlightening her, but in reality we never would - I don't respect the man any less for having "illigitimate" on his birth certificate or having pre-marital sex (tsk tsk but my mum's generation take that kind of thing more seriously so could never tell her! 

Personally, there is lots of public information people can read about me - whether I pay my bills on time, where I live, etc etc, I've no concerns about anyone looking at my birth certificate whether it's in the comfort of their own home or at Scotland's people.