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    HOW TO ACCESS FREE RECORDS ON THE SCOTLANDSPEOPLE DATABASE

    Jan 14, 2022 5 minutes

    It’s an often-overlooked fact that Scottish online research doesn’t need to cost a fortune. I’ve heard criticism of the official government records website, ScotlandsPeople, because it supposedly charges for everything – but this is not the case. Here, I share some of the resources you can access on the site for no cost at all.

    Sign up and search

    It’s free to register to use the ScotlandsPeople service and carry out searches in any of the datasets. These include civil registration indexes; census returns; testaments and inventories; valuation rolls; military appeals; Church of Scotland pre-1855 parish records; Kirk Session records; a variety of Catholic sources before and after 1855; and other, non-conformist denominations’ parish registers.

    Estate plans are a useful source for locating your ancestors who worked for one of Scotland’s landowning families

    The list of results for any of these can be viewed free of charge, and some give more than just the name of the person you’re seeking.

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