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.

As part of our research we provide transcriptions, they are included in our reports and also as part of our family tree packages. This past year we have transcribed 1000's of Birth Deaths and Marriages alone. These can be provided in a format to match the dimensions of the original records we have used in our research or in narrative form. They are arranged according to your requirements, perhaps by date or by name and included in our family tree and ancestral line packages and bespoke historical reports. The file below is an example of an appendix of transcriptions for an all line pedigree research package carried out one morning last week.

Can you research my Scottish family tree?

For over a decade I have been providing family tree research in Scotland. Outwith my work as a professionally qualified Genealogist as I go around my daily and social activities here in Perthshire I often get asked what I do for a living?

‘’I am a qualified genealogist’’ provokes a variety of interested and interesting responses which can be summarised as follows;

 ‘’I would love to research my family tree like on Who Do You Think You Are, can you do this’’

 ‘’ I have been online and tried to research my Scottish family tree but there is not much to see on Ancestry and I tried searching online Scotland’s People but couldn’t see my Grandmother’s marriage, there were too many Stewarts. Can you help me?’’

‘’What is a Genealogist?’’

Taking the last question first… I answer

‘’I trace Scottish family trees and descendants using a variety of public and private records available online and in archives. I advise upon and undertake bespoke historical research for my clients.’’

These conversations outwith work take place outside the school gates/nursery, at parties, at the pub, on aeroplanes, at church and in my local community and so on. ‘’Yes I could research or help you to research your Scottish family tree’’ is my response and over the past decade I have lost count of the number of family trees I have provided for friends or friends of friends. They don't have hundreds of pounds to spend on professional research of their Scottish family tree,  don’t have the time to do this themselves or are living too far away from Edinburgh/Glasgow/Hawick/Inverness to access Scotland’s People to do this at a reasonable cost.  

There must be a way to make fully documented and evidenced professional Scottish family tree research available. In April last year we formed OldScottish.com with the purpose of making Genealogy and Family History Research more accessible. Your Family Tree Research is now more affordable as over the past 9 months we have been researching and developing a number of introductory services to do this. We are extremely excited to launch a selection of Introductory Scottish Family Tree Packages to celebrate Homecoming 2014. 

Find out more about our Homecoming 2014 special offers here.