PRIMER: How do I research my Scottish family history?

I've put together a quick primer if you have just suddenly found yourself with time at home, and need something to fill it with, or if you know anyone else who might be interested. I hope it helps!

To start researching your Scottish family history, you need to work out when people were born, married (if they did) and died. To do this, you need to access the records available online at ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), which cost £7.50 for 30 credits.

Scottish birth records note when and where a child was born, the names of its parents, when he or she married (if they did), the name of the informant, and when registered.

Knowing the birth date and the names of the parents allows you to later establish when they married - the marriage records include both spouses ages and names of their parents (so you can confirm you have the right record). You can also then work out when they died, as Scottish death records should also note the names of the parents in death records, as well as the deceased's age, and the names of any spouses of the deceased. Death records for women can be searched for by maiden surname and married name.

From the birth record, the date and place of the parents' marriage should allow you to locate that record on ScotlandsPeople, which in turn will give you their ages when they married, and the names of both sets of their parents. From this, you can then also check when each of them were born, and later when they died.

In all records, birth, marriage and death, the names of the parents should match (although there may be some spelling variation) for the person concerned.

That's the theory. It doesn't always work. But mostly it does!

Key thing - Scottish civil registration started in 1855. For privacy reasons, records for births are only available online if over 100 years, marriages if over 75 years, and deaths if over 50 years, although indexes arre available for more recent records. So you may need to dig out some records at home first, or ask your elderly auntie for any info she can give you!

Prior to 1855, you then need to look to church records. The main groupings of records for these, alos on ScotlandsPeople, are the Church of Scotland's Old Parish Records (OPRs), Other churches (Presbyterian churches which broke away from the Church of Scotland), and Roman Catholic Parish Registers (CPRs). The records are not as detailed as civil records after 1855, at least, in most cases.

Some tips - errors creep in to all records, based on who the informant was. The most accurate records are marriage records - the spouses gave their details directly to the registrar (children's parents are informant at birth, and any and their aunty can be the informant at death, and not know the correct info!).

From 1841-1911, Scottish census records, also available on ScotlandsPeople, will tell you who was in the family household, and help you to understand how big the family was (kids etc). They can help to fill in the gaps.

You'll find a lot more information about these records on ScotlandsPeople, but in summary, to build a tree, this is what you are hopefully going to get from the records in terms of key details:

Births: name of child, parents names, when and where they married
Marriages: names of spouses, their ages, names of their parents
Deaths: name of deceased, names of any spouses, age at death, names of both parents

You will also find additional detail such as occupations, addresses, and status of parents (i.e. alive or deceased).

You will also need to store the information you find, and to build the actual family tree!

Many family history website offer free platforms on which to build a family tree, including Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk), FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk), TreeView (https://treeview.co.uk) and MyHeritage (www.myheritage.com). All offer FREE basic accounts - you should not have to take out a paid subscription - although free accounts may have some restrictions in terms of tree size etc. Certainly enough to get you started though!

Beyond this, there is a tonne of stuff you can chase up on other sites and sources. But establishing births, marriages and deaths, and how people relate to each other, is certainly the starting point.

Have fun!

NB: I'll put together further basic primers on Irish and English research in the coming days also.

Chris

You can pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 (out April). Also available, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.