Well, I'm Scottisd in a circuitous way! My father's family are Scots, my mother's from Northern Ireland, so Ulster Scots for the most part!
I have to say, there is a quite a negative attitude to Scotland's People by a lot of the English dominated family history press, which tends to focus a lot on SP's monopoly on the images to the records. They seem to want to try to find a way to belittle the set-up up here in any way they can. Yes, SP has the images, but for a quid at a time, that's not bad going, and they are by and large well digitised, with an excellent customer services section if you have problems. Compare with the Ulster Historical Foundation, for example, charging £6 at a time (£4 for members) to get the most basic transcript details for records from Antrim and Down, via a service that allows no help whatsoever with its search parameters. I've raised that a few times with one mag in particular down south, and they don't want to know, but keep attacking SP.
The only digitised English records online just now are the census records, and who remembers the hoo-haa when 1901 was launched - at that stage Scotland already had 1881 to 1901 available (with 1881 as transcripts just). Any mention of that in the press - no! The National Archives had apparently invented the wheel, or so it seemed!
The English records will come online at some stage through the DOVE project (I don't now too much about it just now), but we should be proud that we're way ahead of the game!
I've heard from a source at the GROS that the Irish are also looking into digitising their BDM records (north and south), and of course, the Irish censuses are currently being digitised.
Hopefully in ten years, the whole UK will be completely up and running with online records. But we got there first!!! lol
Chris
