ScotlandsPeople access omnishambles continues

Over the last few days various colleagues have been sharing experiences at family history centres across the country which offer access to the ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) computer system - based at Alloa, Inverness, Hawick, Glasgow and Kilmarnock. Since the disastrous upgrade nearly two weeks ago, there have been many cancellations for bookings by these centres, as I previously reported at https://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2022/11/problems-with-records-access-at.html. The problems seem to be continuing - I've just been informed by a colleague that several people turned up today to the registrars service at Glasgow, based in the Mitchell Library, only to find a notice pinned up saying that the service had been suspended since December 2nd due to 'connectivity issues' - apparently none of them had been contacted in advance to advise them of the situation. From another colleague, services in Inverness tomorrow (Tuesday) are also cancelled: "We feel that we should cancel your booking on Tuesday 6 December as apart from not actually being able to connect to the system there are some functions that are not working correctly."

As previously suggested, if you are planning to visit any of the centres you may wish to first give them a call to ask for a status update - you'll find contact details at https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/local-family-history-centres. For the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh - which does seem to be still going - details are via https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/visit-us/scotlandspeople-centre.

In the meantime, the list of nonsense goes on. I had heard from several folk that there was a problem linking to Registers of Corrected Entries images on ScotlandsPeople when these are mentioned on pages for births, marriages and deaths. Bizarrely, I just looked for the death of my three times great grandmother to check this, she having been murdered in 1866. Having saved the image of her death record and the RCE image, I tried to find these in my 'saved images' area. I can find the RCE record - but not the death record, which also does not turn up when trying to perform a search in the deaths database. And wildcards are still not functioning.

This is fast turning into a full-on omnishambles from the NRS. If you are not desperate to use ScotlandsPeople urgently, I'd maybe give it a few more days to see if they can get it back into some kind of fit state for purpose, or at least repeat any searches again in the near future in case they are not returning true search results.

Update - thanks to Alison Spring for tweeting that service at Kilmarnock seems to be fine this week.

Update 5.50pm - ScotlandsPeople has contacted me to say that the RCE images issue has now been resolved, although I have heard from a genealogist colleague that some of the images and links have yet to be restored.

Update, Tues 9.15am - there is now no access to any images on ScotlandsPeople, at home or in family history centres. Clusterbùrach. (Now resolved, as of 9.30)

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.