Scottish Genealogy
Scots are lucky: Scotland has some of the most comprehensive vital records in the world. It is generally possible to trace almost all families back to the beginning of civil registration in 1855 and many can be traced further into the eighteenth, seventeenth, or even sixteenth centuries. Add to this a tradition of genealogical scholarship well over four hundred years old and it would be difficult to find a better place to begin tracing your family tree.
That said, we haven't yet quite reached the stage of being able to type a grandparent's name into a webpage and proceeding to download their family tree all the way back to Charlemagne, despite what some people might claim. Genealogy is a technical branch of scholarship that takes numerous skills and years to master. Scottish genealogy, in particular, presents it own difficulties: widely varying record coverage, famously difficult handwriting, a complex and confusing array of surviving archival material, and a populace which possessed an unusually small pool of names, making it sometimes very difficult to distinguish, say, one Colin Campbell from another.
I've been gradually posting some resources which might be helpful if you're studying a Scottish family:
Copyright © 2013-14 Kelsey Jackson Williams
That said, we haven't yet quite reached the stage of being able to type a grandparent's name into a webpage and proceeding to download their family tree all the way back to Charlemagne, despite what some people might claim. Genealogy is a technical branch of scholarship that takes numerous skills and years to master. Scottish genealogy, in particular, presents it own difficulties: widely varying record coverage, famously difficult handwriting, a complex and confusing array of surviving archival material, and a populace which possessed an unusually small pool of names, making it sometimes very difficult to distinguish, say, one Colin Campbell from another.
I've been gradually posting some resources which might be helpful if you're studying a Scottish family:
Copyright © 2013-14 Kelsey Jackson Williams