Scottish Catholic Registers on Virtual Volumes

Thanks to Kirsty Wilkinson (@genealogygirl) for letting me know that the National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk) is now providing free access to the digitised Scottish Catholic Registers via its Virtual Volumes portal in the Historic Search Room.

Although Catholic records are available on the online ScotlandsPeople website (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), they are not yet available at the centre in Edinburgh - so just pop upstairs (OK, out the back door, in the old Sasines entrance and up the stairs to go one floor up in same building! lol)

Kirsty has mentioned that on Virtual Volumes, there is now a link which takes you to a 17 page PDF listing the various parts of the registers with references (e.g. GB240/MP8/1/1/1) which you can then put into Virtual Volumes to see a digitised copy. Where the register previously had an RH number (from the printed copies previously made available by the NAS) this is also included in the listing. The records are not indexed (as on ScotlandsPeople), but are waypointed, as with some of the presbyterian kirk session records. As far as she has been able to make out, the Bishopric of the Forces stuff does not appear to be included. These can be found online on ScotlandsPeople, and actually go beyond Scotland to include records of all British Catholics servicemen serving around the world who registered a vital event (the Bishopric is based in Aldershot).

Chris