help needed finding anything on Richard Ferguson Hughes born 13/7/1916 Glasgow, and wife Mary Jane Baird, 11/11/1925 , unable to find anything on the scotlandspeople site,or ancestry,
any help greatly appreciated, Tony 
There are 6 births of Richard Hughes in the County of Lanark in 1916, and none with middle name Ferguson, so it looks as if he may have acquired the middle name after his birth was registered (not unusual). This is probably the reason why you can't find him on Scotland's People.
Similarly, there are 7 births of Mary Bairds in 1925, none with middle name Jane.
So either they both acquired middle names later, or they were not born in 1916 and 1925 respectively. In any case you will not be able to access the original certificates online because both are less than 100 years ago. Neither can you access the 1948 marriage certificate, which is less than 75 years ago.
All these documents can be accessed, however, in one of three ways.
You can order copies via the Scotland's People web site, and they will send you an extract. This wouldn't be a good idea for the births, because until you get the marriage certificate you won't know the names of their parents so you won't know which birth certificates to get. Also, each extract costs £12.
You can hire a professional searcher who will find and transcribe the relevant certificates for a fee which will be less than the cost of three extracts. There are links to lists of searchers on the SP web site. This is probably the quickest method.
Or you can appeal for a helpful person who is going to the Scotland's People Centre to transcribe them for you. This is the cheapest method, since you don't pay (but the helpful person still has to pay a fee for a day's research, so it's not totally free) but also the least reliable as it depends on someone being prepared to give up a few minutes of their own research time for you.
As for Ancestry, forget it. It's close to useless for basic Scottish research. Ancestry has no original Scottish baptisms, banns, birth, marriage or death certificates, census or wills. It is not an alternative source of information for the vast majority of Scottish records, though it does have census indexes which may help to locate the actual records, and it does have some stuff that is good for fleshing out your tree once you have the basics in place from Scotland's People.
