Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 9

Genealogy has been revolutionized by computers, bringing data and even images of records to your own home and, more significantly, making them really easy to search. Being able to look at the whole Scottish 1851 census online is useful: being able to search it in seconds for your great-granny is revolutionary. Scotland has led the way in making its national records accessible and searchable online, and the website www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk is a unique resource that has changed the face of Scottish genealogy for ever. It is your great good fortune to be tracing your Scottish family history now.

Computers are readily available in libraries or internet cafés (or friends’ houses!). If you don’t use the internet already, I would strongly recommend learning from a friend or joining a class, as it will make tracing your Scottish roots vastly easier. If you absolutely can’t bear the idea, ask an internet-savvy friend or relative to do your look-ups for you.

LEFT: A page from www.genesreunited. com showing a list of references to ancestors called Lachlan MacLeod. You can tell which may be relevant by the years and places of birth: by clicking on the name you can send an email to the person who submitted the information.

There are several excellent websites that put like-minded genealogists in touch with each other, particularly the British-based www.genesreunited.com, though sites such as the American www.onegreatfamily.com will contain many families of Scottish descent too. You enter names, dates and places for your family, and the sites tell you if anyone else has entered the same details. When new people join and enter the same relatives, they’ll easily find you. It’s a new method, that really works.

RIGHT: The front page of the ScotlandsPeople website.