A Few Notes About The Resources
The Births, Deaths and Marriages are in two forms. Everything from 1855 should have been reported to and recorded by The Scottish Records Office and it was compulsory to do so. Even so, some records haven't been located either because of a miss-spelling or because the rules were broken. Previous to 1855 the records used are those of The Church of Scotland. Recording the events was not compulsory but encouraged and generally complied with. Unfortunately there are gaps in the records which cause us problems. This could be because of a lost or damaged ledger or because the parish did not have a clerk for a period or because charges were levied and some people decided not to pay. Of course, one gap in the records causes us a major problem as a missing branch takes the twigs with it. Church records go back as far as the 1500s but some parishes only started in the 1700s. Both the SRO and CoS records can be searched (for a cost) on the Scotlandpeople website or in person at New Register House at the east end of Princes Street.
The Roman Catholic Church did have its own records but they didn't start as early as the Church of Scotland. Also, since most RCs in Scotland were descendants of the immigrants fleeing the Irish potato famine of around 1850 we have to look there for records and, sadly, most of those were destroyed as a result of the rebels burning them in 1922. The Anderson line has both Protestant and Catholic immigrants from Ireland but both sets of records suffer from this destruction.
The census records are invaluable in supplying information about lifestyle as the number of rooms in the house, number of inhabitants, ages, occupations and relationships are all given as well as the places of birth. There are variations though between the censuses in terms of what was recorded. In 1841 the adult ages were only given to the nearest 5 downwards so someone who was 23 would be recorded as 20 although some enumerators seem to have ignored this. Ages are notoriously innacurate in the censuses, especially with women! Maybe some people couldn't actually remember what age they were but it tends to be gender-related. In 1911 women were asked how many years they had been married, how many children they had given birth to and how many were still alive. The incidence of child death is something which we can find quite disturbing when we refer to old records but it is a fact that childhood diseases which have now been eradicated used to take heavy tolls and couples would have many children with the expectation that not all would survive to adulthood.
There are many links to maps throughout the site and these can be used in various ways. Firstly, a link to a modern Google Map allows you to access Google Street View to look at the buildings which stand there in the present day. You can also zoom out to see where the location is in relation to the larger area. Some older maps have been copied from the National Libraries of Scotland collection and most of them provide a special feature which allows the old map to be overlaid onto the present-day map with a slider bar to control transparency. See here for an example.
There are Tree Diagrams and Narrative Reports accessible from the Resources menu. These are rough-and-ready dumps from the Rootsmagic software I use to store and document my research. They might not be 100% up-to-date but they provide alternative ways of viewing the information and allow printed copies to be taken away.
Photo galleries will be added over time.