How to start to search for your Scottish ancestors

[DCubed]

I promised WhiteTiger and a couple of others a "serious list" for Scottish genealogy, starting from scratch. Here are a couple of sites that have every thing you need to know to start a successful search. http://www. ScotlandsClans.com bills itself as THE place for "tracing your Scots ancestors on the web". It has links you can follow that would keep you busy for years, plus the location of the very best tutorials for learning what genealogy research is and how to do it. On its first page it will ask you to type in the surname you are looking for, press search, and you're off. I typed in my family name of Wills and on the first hit it came back with 402 times Wills in listed in English origins and 1393 times it's listed in Scottish origins. And I've always thought this was a small family!! See why I said this site and its links will keep you busy for a long, long time? Among the links, you can go to the Scottish census records, marriage licenses, death certificates, property records and on and on. Some of the official sources for records do charge a nominal fee for copying services, but all the other help is free! One more site that is highly rated is http://irc.scottishsearch.net. This is "The Scottish Search Engine for 4000+ Scottish Web Sites, including 408 sites on clans, tartans, and genealogy". They have a genealogy chat room, but the times I've dropped in there it looked pretty weak. But then I found the chat group for my clan at that site and learned tons! Mahar here knows more about this process than anyone, so keep on asking him questions, couple that resource with these sites to explore, and you should be all set up to be a Scottish Genealogist! Dee

[DCubed]

Once you find out what clan your last name is part of, you can look up your clan on this neat map to see where your clan historically came from. The clan map is at http://www.arsc.edu/~lforbes/scot_pic.html. My clan, Clan Gunn, is from as far north as you can get in Scotland without falling into some really cold water. No wonder I always want the A/C turned up high! It must be in my DNA!

[Marhar]

Dear Dee
I wish it was that Easy, I have been searching for the last 16 years, and still find out things that I thought was our family not to be so at all. The biggist problem is the lack of proper names and ages in Census's, it was left to the Enumerator to write down what He thought they had said as best he could, and that is where mistakes did happen.

You could follow a family line for months only to find out it was not yours. You are right though it is a fascinating hobby, but very time consuming, and you are better to start at a young age when you have living parents and grandparents, who can give a little bit of a start to your search.
But dont lose heart if you hit a dead end, as you most surely will.
Happy hunting

Marhar

[DCubed]

Mahar - You're right! I reread my post and I think it could get people started off on the wrong foot entirely. I was asked by some Scottish folk about tracing family in Scotland. In other posts I have stated what I've always been told was the cardinal rule of genealogy: start with your own parents and work back! I should have restated that here for anyone just starting out. I was very fortunate to be raised in a family that was interested in the family's history, so I grew up being entertained with stories about my ancestors. When I grew up, I visited as many of my older relatives as I could, put a tape recorder on the table, and started asking questions. With my relatives, it only took a question or two before they started talking non-stop about the good old days. I also asked all of them if they had any old family photos that I could copy. I collected photographs that other family members had no idea existed and many of the photos were over a hundred years old! I also got any family documents that they would let me xerox and from that I got wills going back to the 1700's. I've only recently started searching on the internet and my biggest success in that has been finding a distant cousin who I had never met. She has many records I don't have, while I have stuff, especially the photos, that she didn't have. I found her on the surname search board on genealogy.com.
For anyone just beginning genealogy, start with your own family and work back! There's no other way to know which people in the "old country" are kin to you or not without working backwards. And even if I am never able to trace my family tree any farther back that I already have, all these family stories, which I have carefully written down and told my own children, and all the old photographs which I have made copies of for all my cousins, have enriched our sense of family so much. While it would be neat to brag that I was a direct descendant of some famous Scottish warrior of the 15th century, I like knowing that I'm a direct descendant of the kind of person I've found out my great-grandmother was. She died when my daddy was a little boy, but I have interviewed so many people who told me stories about her. That's the value of genealogy to me, learning how the people we came from handled the challenges that life presented them.