Every so often I go and dabble in a little family history research, and this morning I decided to see if I could find any more information out about the Scottish line on my wife's side. We have a subscription to ancestry and have also bought credits on Scotlands People to try to access the information about that part of the family.
The awesome thing about the Scottish records is how complete they are. With the English BMD (Birth, Marriage, Death) records that are accessible online, you get very little information: name, date and general area. In comparison, when you find the Scottish record that you need it gives much much more detail.
For example, I went looking for some death records this morning as we already had the majority of births, and this is the one for my wife's 3x Great Grandfather. We knew he was born in 1849 in Kirriemuir, Angus, and we had him appearing in censuses up until 1901 so he had to have died sometime after that!
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| Death record of Alexander Donald |
With a pretty broad time range entered, there were only 16 hits on the site, enough to fit on one page and enabled me to see some details for them all.
The other very useful thing about the Scottish ancestors we've come across is that they often have pretty distinctive middle names (frequently mother's maiden names) which makes it much easier to discern whether or not they're the one you're looking for! There was therefore only one possible match.
Looking at the image of the death record confirmed this was the man I was after, as his parents are also listed, along with his mother's maiden name. I did, however, find out some new information on this record - in the column with his name, there are two spouses mentioned, and we hadn't known about the second one. This made it possible for me then to go and find the marriage record of Alexander Donald and Eliza Smith, something we may never have found had these ancestors not been Scottish!
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| Marriage record of Alexander Donald and Eliza Smith |
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