I'm having dificulty tracing the birth records of a couple of ancestors on SP even though I can narrow down to the approximate year and parish through marriage & death records.
Is it possible to view all the records per year in a parish on microfishe at the SP hub in Edinburgh or at some of the local libraries or are their search systems the same as SP (ie search by name only
Cheers
Bryoung
Record searches
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AndrewP
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Re: Record searches
Hi bryoung,
The computer search in the ScotlandsPeople Centre insists on at least a surname to make a search, in a similar manner to ScotlandsPeople online.
The microfiche records are more difficult to access these days. I think you have to show the attendant in the searchroom that you cannot get from the onscreen search what you are looking for. The microfiche sets for each registration district contain an index at the end of each year that would serve your purpose, but I don't know if you can request these nowadays.
Back in the days when your searches were all done my microfiche self-service they were there for you to view. For a rural district, the index usually fits on to one fiche. For urban districts, it can be split over a number of fiche to accommodate the amount of names. This type of search was particularly useful where the name had been mis-spelled and the computer search could not find it, but the human input into the judgement of the name could spot it amongst the list.
The above all stands as true for the statutory records from 1855 onwards. If however your search is in the OPR era, up to 1854, then there is no annual index for these which, apart from being onscreen, are on continuous microfilm rather than fiche of a fixed anount of records. However, they can be searched on the internet on the online IGI which has quite a wide tolerance for spelling variations.
See http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/ ... _form=true
The IGI is an index with no access to the records, but it should be able to tell you if the record exists, and therefore if it is worth searching further for elsewhere, such as on ScotlandsPeople. Make sure that any entry you do find is an extract from the records and not a submitted entry. The extracted ones can be found in the records. The submissions are occasionally to be found in the records, but more often are not - they are often an estimate of a birth, calculated or guessed from other information, and thus there is not a record to substantiate them. One further complication is that there are many parishes for which the online version of the IGI has only the female births - frustrating if you are seeking a make birth entry.
All the best,
AndrewP
The computer search in the ScotlandsPeople Centre insists on at least a surname to make a search, in a similar manner to ScotlandsPeople online.
The microfiche records are more difficult to access these days. I think you have to show the attendant in the searchroom that you cannot get from the onscreen search what you are looking for. The microfiche sets for each registration district contain an index at the end of each year that would serve your purpose, but I don't know if you can request these nowadays.
Back in the days when your searches were all done my microfiche self-service they were there for you to view. For a rural district, the index usually fits on to one fiche. For urban districts, it can be split over a number of fiche to accommodate the amount of names. This type of search was particularly useful where the name had been mis-spelled and the computer search could not find it, but the human input into the judgement of the name could spot it amongst the list.
The above all stands as true for the statutory records from 1855 onwards. If however your search is in the OPR era, up to 1854, then there is no annual index for these which, apart from being onscreen, are on continuous microfilm rather than fiche of a fixed anount of records. However, they can be searched on the internet on the online IGI which has quite a wide tolerance for spelling variations.
See http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/ ... _form=true
The IGI is an index with no access to the records, but it should be able to tell you if the record exists, and therefore if it is worth searching further for elsewhere, such as on ScotlandsPeople. Make sure that any entry you do find is an extract from the records and not a submitted entry. The extracted ones can be found in the records. The submissions are occasionally to be found in the records, but more often are not - they are often an estimate of a birth, calculated or guessed from other information, and thus there is not a record to substantiate them. One further complication is that there are many parishes for which the online version of the IGI has only the female births - frustrating if you are seeking a make birth entry.
All the best,
AndrewP