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it's deja vu all over again

26/11/2022

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Six years ago, when the Scotland's People website was relaunched with an entirely new interface, there were serious problems when it went live. I wrote about these problems on a number of occasions. (here, here, here and here). Over the course of the next six months or so, the developers gradually fixed some of these problems (see here and here).

Obviously, when a major new website is launched, you can expect some minor problems, but it was clear that many of the problems should have been picked up during testing before the new site was launched. It was also clear that some problems could also have been detected had there been proper engagement with site users.

So it's more than a little dispiriting, if perhaps not entirely surprising, to find ourselves back in the same situation with another "upgrade" to the website. In the last few years, the National Records of Scotland have not done themselves any favours in terms of public relations, with what could charitably be described as a reluctance to engage with users, which led me to prepare an open letter - signed by over a hundred genealogists, researchers and historians - to the head of NRS, Paul Lowe, to which the response was underwhelming to say the least.

On Wednesday, the Scotland's People site was down (and the centres closed) for a new upgrade. Communication about this was typically poor. I'm aware of one person who had a booking at one of the satellite centres who, when they contacted the centre to rearrange their visit, was told that the centre knew nothing of this down time!

So it was with a degree of trepidation that I visited the revamped website on Thursday when it came back online. And the problems were not hard to find.

One common technique Scottish researchers use is to search for the death of a married woman under two surnames, her maiden name and her married name. This makes it much easier to identify the correct record before you pay for it. And this was a major problem in 2016. So I searched for a death I knew was there - Margaret Carstairs died in Crail in 1857 age 49. This was the result:​
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Now I knew that Margaret's married name was Graham, so I repeated the same search changing only the surname:
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Notice that the reference details are identical - so this is the same record, indexed under both Carstairs and Graham. So if I searched the records using both surnames, I should get this record again. Here's what happens though:
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When they relaunched the site in 2016, this search was also broken, but in a different way - if you searched for a death with two surnames, it returned all results with either surname (a Boolean OR) rather than results with both surnames (a Boolean AND). This time round, the search fails altogether.

This is far from the only issue though. The SP home page has a big friendly box to get you started, where you can enter a name and a date range and search across all the records
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Running that search shows the following results summary:
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If you then click through to the any of the results for Old Parish Registers, it passes the date range as 17010101 to 17100101 (in other words 1 January 1701 to 1 January 1710). What that means is that any events recorded from 2 January 1710 to 31 December 1710 will be missed, even though they are there.
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In 2016, I wrote about the strange results for Coupar Angus. This bug was fairly easy to explain - for some reason Coupar Angus had been assigned to the county of Forfar, whereas all other parishes in the same county were assigned to Angus. (Angus and Forfarshire are two different names for the same county). A minor issue, but one that is simply down to the way the data was recorded.

So I was curious to see if Coupar Angus was behaving itself. I searched for deaths in Coupar Angus between 1855 and 1900, and this is what was returned:
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I'm sure we'd have heard if the good folk of Coupar Angus had discovered immortality, so this result seemed unlikely. So I removed the date range to see if that made any difference and suddenly the deaths were revealed:
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But even that's not the end of the problems for Coupar Angus. I repeated the search removing the sort order and got the following results:
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Last time I checked, Auchterarder and Perth were not Coupar Angus, so quite why those results appeared there is beyond me.

One issue with the original launch was the way filenames were assigned to saved images. Back then, when you saved an image, the files were simply given a datestamp as the filename - not very useful if like me you have thousands of images downloaded from Scotland's People. Five months after the relaunch, this was fixed so that images were automatically given meaningful filenames that allowed you to identify the record type, the year, registration district and so on.

Unfortunately, that problem is back - now the default filename is "ScotlandsPeople_imagenameraw", which is not very helpful at all, and would rapidly become unmanageable if you save large numbers of files.

At the bottom left of each search results page is a list of handy links to other record sets in the same category (Statutory Registers, Church records and so on). Every single one of these links was initially broken, although they now appear to be working. Although this problem has now seemingly been resolved, checking for broken links is a basic feature of pre-launch testing, but clearly it wasn't done.

A search for Carstairs births in Crail 1926-1950 produces 217 results, none of which are from Crail.
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There are however 9 results from Dunfermline, which is at least in the same county - Fife - as Crail. However, if you then search for Carstairs births in Dunfermline in the same period, you get the following results:
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So there are Carstairs births in Dunfermline in this period, but you can't find them by searching for, well, Carstairs births in Dunfermline.

There are other issues, but I think by now you're getting the picture, and this post is long enough as it is. It's abundantly clear that once again, the NRS have launched an update that is not fit for purpose. It's hard to see how these bugs could have slipped through a properly designed testing regime. The implication is that the testing regime was at best inadequate. Some at least of these problems could readily have been avoided had there been advance consultation with users. As someone who's used Scotland's People and its forerunner Scots Origins since it was first launched in 1998 - I was one of the first 100 people to register with the site - I've previously offered to test updates free of charge. One of the key demands of our open letter was the establishment of a meaningful user group, something that the NRS management do not seem inclined to agree to. Perhaps this latest avoidable fiasco could change their minds.

For users, my advice would be not to trust any negative results and either postpone your research until they fix these problems, or else think creatively when searching - or be prepared for long trawls through irrelevant results.

PS None of this bodes well for the much-delayed launch of the 1921 census, which according to the NRS' own deadline is due to launch in the next 35 days. Fingers crossed they don't mess that up as well.
2 Comments

What to expect from the 1921 census

31/8/2022

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Work is well advanced for the release of the 1921 census records later this year and we are confident we will publish the census before the end of the year. We know customers are eagerly waiting this exciting release and we will provide a release date as soon as we can. pic.twitter.com/nxCUu5fmcw

— NatRecordsScot (@NatRecordsScot) August 31, 2022
Today the National Records of Scotland broke radio silence on the much-delayed publication of the 1921 census. I won't go into the details of the sorry saga surrounding the release of these records - suffice to say this has not been the NRS' finest hour. Indexing is about 60% complete. The contract was signed in January, and the NRS are now saying they are "confident" they will publish before the end of the year, whereas a few months ago they were saying they "will" publish in the second half of this year, it seems likely we'll have to wait a few months yet before we can finally see the first census after World War One.

It seems opportune therefore to set out what to expect when the census is eventually released. From the first census in 1801, the amount of information gathered increased regularly, making the census returns more useful for historians and genealogists alike. The 1921 census continued that process, including more information than its 1911 counterpart.

The individual household schedules are not being published - instead, what we will see are the enumeration books. It's important to understand the difference - the household schedules were filled in by the residents, usually by the head of household. The enumeration books are transcriptions of those schedules carried out by enumerators - individuals employed by the census office. So unlike the English equivalent, you won't be able to see your ancestors' handwriting.

Field
Notes
​Schedule number
As in previous census, a sequential number for the household within the Enumeration District
​Address
The address of the house or building. Standard abbreviations may be used, as may dittos
​House rooms
The number of rooms in the house as a whole
​House persons
The number of people in the house as a whole
​Holding rooms
The number of rooms in the house occupied by the individual household/family group
Holding persons
The number of people within the household/family group
Name
Full name of each person in the household. 'Ditto' or 'Do.' may be used.
Relationship to head of household
Self-explanatory. Abbreviations to be used:
  • Head - head of household
  • Daur - daughter
  • Rel - relative
  • G-son - grandson
  • G-daur - granddaughter
  • Vis - visitor
  • Serv - servant
  • Br - boarder
  • Lr - lodger
Age
​Given in years and months
​​Marriage / orphanhood
An extension from previous census, with the following abbreviations used:
  • S - single
  • M - married
  • W - widowed
  • D - divorced
  • BA - both parents alive
  • FD - father dead
  • MD - mother dead
  • ​BD - both parents dead
Birthplace​
  • For people born in the UK, county followed by burgh or parish.
  • For people born outwith the UK, country followed by province or state. (Examples given in instructions: Canada, Quebec; India, Bengal; France, Charente)
Nationality
​
  • For people born in the UK, no entry required
  • For people born in the British Empire, but outwith the UK
    • Vis for visitor, or
    • Res for resident
  • For people born outwith the British Empire:
    • Vis - visitor, or
    • Res - resident
    • and
    • Born Brit - British subject by birth, or
    • Nat Brit - British subject by naturalisation, or
    • 'French', 'United States citizen', 'Chinese', 'Pole', 'Czecho-Slovakian' etc etc as the case may be​
​Gaelic​
Left blank except for people aged 3 and upwards who can speak Gaelic. Options are:
  • G - Gaelic only
  • G&E - Gaelic and English
Occupation​
​Abbreviations discouraged, except for
  • H D - Household duties
Value
Employment status. Options are:
  • E - employer
  • W - worker (employee)
  • OA - own account (i.e. self-employed)
  • Ret - retired
  • OW - out of work
People describing themselves as retired and out of work were to be recorded as retired only.
Employment
Name of the employer, if any, and a description of the business. For domestic servants (including such workers as gamekeepers), the word Private is to be recorded
​​National health insurance
  • If the person has national health insurance, the letter M or F to indicate that they are male or female
  • If the person does not have national health insurance, column to be left blank
​Dependent children number
Number of dependent children
Dependent children ages
​Ages of dependent children. Boxes for each age 1-15, with an x placed in each applicable column. If there are two or more dependent children in the same age band, the xs are to be placed one above the other.
The other change in terms of what the NRS are producing, is that once the indexing has been completed and the images published on Scotland's People, a complete transcription of all the fields will be produced as part of the contract. This is something academic historians have long been pushing for, as it makes all sorts of historical research possible in a way that isn't feasible with indexed images alone. As yet, though, it's not clear if this transcription will be made publicly available when it is eventually complete.
1 Comment

New records added to Scotland's People

26/6/2017

2 Comments

 
Great news from Scotland's People this morning - 36,000 new records have been added to the website. The records include:
  • 20,255 births and baptisms from 1744 to 1855
  • 10,368 marriages and proclamations from 1729 to 1855
  • 5,422 deaths and burials from 1783 to 1855
These records are all from dissenting churches that have subsequently rejoined the Church of Scotland. The Scotland's People news release doesn't explicitly state which new parishes/churches have been added, so we've prepared a handy list:
  • Abernethy Associate (Antiburgher) Congregation, Abernethy United Presbyterian, Abernethy United Free South (CH3/687) PERTH
  • Banff Free, Banff High United Free (CH3/1303) BANFF
  • Biggar Associate (Burgher), Biggar Moat Park, Biggar United Free (CH3/1248) LANARK
  • Campsie West United Free, Campsie Relief, Campsie United Presbyterian (CH3/1041) STIRLING
  • Chirnside Reformed Presbyterian, Chirnside United Free (CH3/336) BERWICK
  • Comrie Associate, Comrie United Presbyterian (CH3/608) PERTH
  • Cromarty Free Church (CH3/586) CROMARTY
  • Dallas Free, Dallas United Free (CH3/1131) MORAY
  • Dunbar East United Presbyterian (CH3/86) EAST LOTHIAN
  • Dunblane Leighton Associate, Dunblane United Presbyterian, Leighton United Free (CH3/90) PER
  • Dunfermline - St Margaret's United Free (CH3/1232) FIFE
  • East Kilbride Relief, East Kilbride United Presbyterian, East Kilbride West United Free (CH3/1001) LANARK
  • Edinburgh - Broughton Place United Associate (CH3/564) EDINBURGH CITY
  • Edinburgh - Corstorphine Free Church, Corstorphine United Free (CH3/514) EDINBURGH CITY
  • Edinburgh - Second Associate (Antiburgher), Potterrow United Presbyterian Church (CH3/117) EDINBURGH CITY
  • Glasgow - John Street Relief Church, John Street United Presbyterian, John Street Secession, John Street United Free (CH3/806) GLASGOW CITY
  • Howgate (Antiburgher) Associate Session, Howgate United Presbyterian, Howgate United Free (CH3/1363) MIDLOTHIAN
  • Kilmarnock (Crookedholm) Reformed Presbyterian (CH3/1318) AYR
  • Kirkcowan United Secession, Kirkcowan United Presbyterian, Kirkcowan United Free (CH3/871) WIGTOWN
  • Kirkliston Free Church, Kirkliston United Free (CH3/1008) MIDLOTHIAN
  • Knockbain - Munlochy Free, Knockbain United Free (CH3/1200) ROSS AND CROMARTY
  • Lanark - Broomgate/Bloomgate First Relief, Lanark United Presbyterian, Lanark United Free (CH3/1449) LANARK
  • Montrose - Second United Associate, John Street (Burgher), Montrose - John Street Associate, Montrose United Free (CH3/858) ANGUS
  • Newton Stewart Relief Church (CH3/246) WIGTOWN
  • Nigg (Antiburgher) Associate, Nigg United Secession, Nigg United Presbyterian (CH3/1433) ROSS AND CROMARTY
  • Paisley - Abbey Close Associate Session (CH3/465) RENFREW
  • Polmont Free, Polmont United Free, Polmont South, later Brightons Parish Church (CH3/1196) STIRLING
  • Stewarton Original Secession, Stewarton Free, Stewarton United Free (CH3/789) AYR
  • Thurso Associate Congregation, Thurso Original Secession (CH3/1399) CAITHNESS
  • Yetholm Burgher (New Light), Yetholm United Presbyterian (CH3/578) ROXBURGH
(This may not be a complete list of the new additions - we compared the new full list on the Scotland's People website to an earlier version to find the differences).
2 Comments

Bug fixes to Scotland's People

20/4/2017

2 Comments

 
The Scotland's People website was down for a couple of hours this morning, to allow the team to update the site. They've made a number of improvements, or rather fixes, to the search engine. Arguably these should have been in place when the site was relaunched in September last year, but after having regular meetings with the team behind the site over the last 6 months, we're a little more understanding of the difficulties they faced than perhaps we were at the time.

The announcement of the fixes reveals that two of the biggest grips Scottish genealogists have had with the new website have at least been fixed:
  • Marriage searches: finally it's now possible once again to search for a marriage using two surnames (one for the bride and one for the groom). This is a major improvement on the initial version of the revamped site, and one which genealogists will warmly welcome.
  • Marriage results: related to the marriage-search fix, marriage searches now show both parties' names on the results page. This is another big improvement on what went before, when you had to click on a link to get a pop-up showing the spouse's name. That was fine if there were only a few results of your search, but quickly became tedious if there were more than a few results.
  • Death searches: You can now search death records using an approximate birth year. This is another important change, making it far easier and a lot less hassle to find the death your looking for. We understand from our discussions with the National Records of Scotland that this was a particularly tricky problem to resolve, as the searches were behaving in unpredictable ways. This problem now appears to have been resolve successfully.
  • Search forms: The labels and column headings have been improved.
  • Return to image view: After reporting a problem with an image, you are returned to the image you were viewing at the time. A minor change, but any improvement in the page flow should be welcomed.
  • Divorce and dissolutions: A gender field has been added.
There are a couple of quirks arising from the changes. Marriage searches may produce duplicate entries - at first glance this seems to happen where one of the parties has alternative versions of her/his name. It's a fairly minor inconvenience, greatly outweighed by the new display of both parties' names. Perhaps of some concern is the National Records of Scotland's statement that "for the majority of searches this will have a successful result" - presumably this means that some searches may produce a false-negative (in other words, the system might tell you there isn't a match when there is one). A little more clarity on this statement would be welcome.

Another consequence of the multiple results for the same marriage is that sorting the search results by "spouse surname" doesn't quite behave as you might expect. We've not done enough testing on the new interface to be sure, but the new system appears to group all results for the same marriage together.

These are however minor quibbles. The changes introduced are a major improvement to search functionality, and we'd like to thank the team at NRS for their hard work in fixing bugs.
2 Comments

Scotland's People update

27/2/2017

1 Comment

 
We've written before about the revamped Scotland's People site, and some of the problems and bugs we found. (See for instance here, here, here and here.) Over the last few months, the staff at the National Records of Scotland and their contractor have been working to resolve the various problems, posting regular updates on their progress.

Over the weekend, we noticed for the first time that one of our particular bugbears has been fixed. When the site first relaunched, the default file names for images were simply date stamps - not very helpful if like us you download large numbers of images. Now when you save an image, the file name defaults to a useful name that incorporates the reference number for the record, making it much easier to keep track of your images.

To clarify this, one image we bought over the weekend for a client was automatically given the following filename:

ScotlandsPeople_C1841_898_00_007_000_2_007Z

Using this filename, you can identify the following information:
  • record type (C = census)
  • the year (1841)
  • the parish/registration district (898 = Stoneykirk)
  • the enumeration district (7)
  • the page number (also 7)
This is a fairly minor change, but makes keeping track of the records you buy from Scotland's People much easier, and we would like to thank the NRS for making this change. Our sources at National Records of Scotland tell us that other fixes/improvements will be coming shortly, so keep an eye on the updates ​page on Scotland's People.

It's always important to remember, though, that not all records are available online. We've published hundreds of thousands of Scottish records not on Scotland's People, and visit the National Records of Scotland regularly. If you're looking for information in these offline records, why not ask if we can help?
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Technical Issues on Scotland's People

2/10/2016

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We've already discussed some of the teething problems of the new Scotland's People website, which was launched this week. Clearly the staff at Scotland's People are listening, because they've acknowledged at least some of the problems. They've also accepted that some of the features of the old site which have been removed will likely be reinstated.
  • Some people have been having problems logging in to the new site - new help pages have been added to help resolve this issue
  • Some deaths in church registers are showing an age of 131. This should be taken to mean that there is no age stated in the index (although it may be given in the actual record).
  • The spouse's name search option in the church marriage registers search is not working. "Please do not use this field in searching or filtering for the time being."
  • The new site uses a single surname variant algorithm (which is actually a great improvement on the old soundex system), but it's not currently working for some surnames
  • The image viewer isn't working for some devices and internet browsers - if this is happening to you, let them know your combination of device and browser version.
  • For saved images, they are looking to make the filter system work on the image header as well as the "Description" field. This is really important to us - we have thousands of images saved, and the ability to filter them by the image header (which crucially includes the name of the person in the record) is essential. Manually adding descriptions to these images would be very time consuming.
They're also asking people to report other search problems. It's great that they are listening, although one of the major search issues - searching for the death of say a married woman using both surnames is still not working and has not been acknowledged (we've described it here).

Meanwhile, we're in the Scotland's People Centre regularly - if you can't find what you're looking for on the Scotland's People website, we may be able to help.

(You can read the full announcement from Scotland's People here)


2 Comments

September 29th, 2016

29/9/2016

1 Comment

 
The new Scotland's People website launched yesterday, and there are some great new features (we'll be writing more about them shortly), and most importantly, some extremely useful new record sets. Eventually it will be a major improvement on the old version, but we've had some misadventures when searching. So far we've found what appear to be four different bugs in the search engine:
  • The date filters for at least some of the new baptismal registers weren't working last night (see here). To give them credit, their twitter person promised to look into this today.
  • The allocation of some districts to counties isn't working properly (Angus and Forfarshire are effectively the same county) - see here.
  • Cross-referencing of surnames in marriages doesn't appear to be working. In my own family, I have a William Smith married a Cecilia Deas in Leslie, Fife, in 1875. Cecilia's certainly in the index:
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So is William, the second entry in this list:
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The Reference and entry numbers are the same, showing that these index entries refer to the same event (which I already knew, I have a copy of the certificate). The search is supposed to allow you to search for a marriage record using both surnames. But when I tried to do so, this is what came up: 
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  • Similarly, if you search for a death with two surnames - a standard tactic for finding the death of a woman who married, who should be indexed under both surnames - the search returns index entries that match *either* surname, rather than *both* surnames. My great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Smith, married John Mathieson. From other sources, I know she was alive in 1901, but was dead by 1937. So what happens if I run a search on both surnames?
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2643 matches! Quite a lot to trawl through. Now what happens if I search for her under just one of the surnames?
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Given that 2493 + 60 = 2553, what the search engine does when you search for a death with two surnames is return all index entries that match either surname. Potentially a useful option in some cases, but not very practical at all in this case. I'm sure Scotland's People will fix these quickly, but just be warned, the search results may not be quite what you're used to.
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Where exactly is Coupar Angus?

29/9/2016

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Coupar Angus is a pleasant little town, with a slightly complicated geography. It's generally accepted that it's mostly in Perthshire, but partly also in Forfarshire/Angus. I say generally, because it seems the new Scotland's People website has a third option - it's in neither.
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The clipping above shows what happens when you search for deaths in Coupar Angus in 1855-1890. There are quite a few, a little under 70 a year. (The actual number will be somewhat lower, because married women are indexed under their maiden names and married names.)

But were these deaths in Angus or Perthshire?
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Not in Perthshire, apparently, so presumably they were in Angus:
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Oh. So where was Coupar Angus?
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Somebody's got some county-coding mixed up ...
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Now you see them, now you don't

28/9/2016

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The new - and slightly delayed - version of the Scotland's People website went live this afternoon. The new records added are obviously more than welcome, but something strange happens when you search the records.

This is what you see when you search for ROBERTSON in one of the new record sets - Bon Accord Free Church baptisms in Aberdeen (NRS Ref: CH3/874/15) - with no dates specified (see the top line of this image for the search parameters):
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You'll notice that the 4 entries are dated between 1849 and 1854. Now watch what happens when you search in the same register for Robertsons born between 1849 and 1854:
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I *think* what's happened is that the baptism dates are not being mapped properly on to the birth date search parameters, but I can't be certain. It's certainly not limited to one record set. The same thing happens when you search in the Kinclaven Associate Session, often referred to as Kirk o' the Muir (NRS Ref CH3/502/2).
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I don't think it should be too difficult to fix this problem, but I'd really have expected this to be picked up in testing.

​Have you tried the new Scotland's People website? What are your impressions?
0 Comments

Scotland's People relaunched

28/9/2016

1 Comment

 
After several unplanned delays, the new-look Scotland's People website went live this afternoon. There are a few changes worth noting:
  • indexes are now free to search - before they cost 1 credit for up to 25 results. This is a great improvement, something many people (including us) have been lobbying NRS to introduce for some time
  • a large collection of non-Church of Scotland registers has been added - these are Protestant churches that rejoined the Church of Scotland up to 1929, mostly Free Church and United Presbyterian Church congregations
  • other new records include civil partnerships (from 2005), divorces (from 1984) and dissolutions (from 2007)
  • the site now has an image library. This appears to be fairly small so far (739 images) and they cost £30 each. I suspect this one will be expanded over time, but I'm not sure how many people will pay that price
  • credits now cost £7.50 for 30 (an increase of 50p)
  • images of Statutory Registers, census returns and old parish registers now cost 6 credits, compared to 5 credits before. This means that these images have gone up from £1.16 to £1.50. The free index searches will offset some of this increase though.
  • the search interface has changed and will probably take some getting used to.
Overall, though, I'd say this looks like a reasonably positive development, especially for people with a common surname (trust me, I'm a Smith!)
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    Genealogy and Family History  - A mix of our news, curious and intriguing discoveries. Research hints and resources to grow your family tree in Scotland from our team.

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