Scottish Ancestors

More and more people are becoming interested in their family history and trying to trace their ancestors to see where they lived and what they did. Over 100 years ago many families tended to stay in the same area of a country be it Scotland or anywhere else but in these modern times families tend to be constantly moving not just around one country but from one country to another and so trying to trace your family tree can become a bit more complicated.

If you stay in the US, Canada, Australia or anywhere else in the world and whilst researching your family tree you come across a Scottish ancestor do not despair for there are lots of different ways you can try to find out more about them. Most of these research techniques have only recently became available thanks to the wonders of science and the internet.

One of the most obvious places to start your research is to use Google to see if the name of your ancestor yields any useful results. This simple search could yield a variety of information on your Scottish ancestor if you are lucky including newspaper articles, ship passenger lists, old photographs or even family websites set up by distant cousins who have became interested in genealogy and posted their findings online.

Not everyone is lucky however using Google but then there are lots of other sites such as Ancestry, Genesreunited and One Great Family that you can use to see if parts of your family tree have already been researched. These sites can save you a lot of time and energy as well as putting you in contact with distant relations. It is always quite interesting to see how far traveled your family tree is.

If you are looking to view Scottish birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates or census information then Scotlandspeople is the best site to visit. Scotlandspeople has over 80 million records and is the official government site for Scottish genealogical data. Information and records are constantly being added to the site and only recently they added Catholic Parish Registers and more family records are expected to be added in the coming year.

Online forums such as Rootschat and the ones at Ancestry and Genesreunited are a great way of discussing any problems you encounter with other family genealogists many of whom will have encountered similar issues in the past and may be able to offer you suggestions on how to overcome your problem.

As interest in genealogy continues to grow through programs such as Who DO You Think You Are? then more and more historical data will be unearthed and made available online to meet the demand. Ancestry have made a lot of military records and documentation online and other sites are scanning newspapers and all sorts of other document which contain information which would be of use to genealogists in their search to trace their ancestors whether they be Scottish or not and so although Scotland may be miles away from where you stay the information is all available at the touch of a button.