I started researching my family tree in the ‘olden days’ before the emergence of the World Wide Web.
At that time records were available only as ‘hard copies’, generally held in public record offices: In my case this necessitated a train journey from my home in Glasgow to General Register House in Edinburgh. Fortunately, the records office lies just across the road from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station.
In those early days, the process by which certificates could be accessed involved
- searching large bound indexes and from these,
- ordering the required certificates on paper request forms (maximum 3), and
- awaiting a cotton-gloved official to escort you to the certificate shelves. Visitors were not permitted to handle the records.
- In due course, publicly accessible indexes were digitised; with the certificates on micro-fiche.
Today the records are computerised and can be accessed on home computers – with the added benefit that the data can be much more efficiently interrogated. Scotland, through its ‘Scotland’s People’ site is a world leader in providing family history information on the internet.
Statutory civil registration was introduced in Scotland on 1 January 1855.
Before the introduction of civil registration, Church of Scotland parish ministers and session clerks kept records of births and baptisms, proclamations of banns and marriages, and deaths and burials. Approximately 3500 of these Old Parish Register (OPR) volumes have survived. They are far from complete and contain much less information than the statutory record.
The combined effect of the above limitations has been that, as well documenting my own pedigree, I have accumulated data on other McCreath lines which to date I have been unable to link with my own pedigree.