I’ve been preparing for a class I’m teaching this coming Sunday on Scotlands People. I LOVE this website. I’ve been using it for about ten years and have become quite adept at extracting information with minimal waste of credits.
If you are unfamiliar with Scotlands People here is the quick scoop on the website. It is not free, but it’s not expensive either. You purchase credits 30 at a time for £7. I’m an American so my cost is worked out based on the exchange rate at the time of purchase – usually about $10-11. Once you have credits you are ready to go to work.
There are several different record sets. You choose your record set and then put in some search terms. The website will spit back a number telling you how many results match your terms. I massage my terms and filters until my results are manageable. The more you know about a person to start, the better you can tailor your search terms.
Once you like your terms and the results they bring up, you purchase a list of results for 1 credit or about 37¢ per page. If your results are on multiple pages you only pay for one page at a time. The list of results tells you a very limited amount of info. From there if you see a record that looks like the one you want, you purchase it for 5 credits or about $1.85. If you are really accurate you might get a record for about $2.22. Not bad!
Bonus – depending on how you set up your search terms, sometimes your list will include records for other family members. For instance my Boles family is awesome to research. There are so few of them I can search by last name only, no gender, a parish, and a year range and pick up a whole bunch of siblings in a list of birth records.
Scotlands People is one of my very favorite websites! I love that every record is on there and I don’t have to wait for a trip to an archive or library, and I don’t have to wait for someone to look up my document and mail/email it to me. I find what I need and get the image immediately.
I’m excited for Sunday night!