Your Scottish Ancestry
Your Scottish Ancestry
Ancestralscotland.com
Do you have family connections with Scotland? Where are your ancestral roots? Are you fascinated to find out your family history and where you come from?Now you can start researching your family tree from home, with the click of the mouse ……………
An innovative, interactive and extremely easy to use website has just been launched to assist people across the world retrace their family footsteps back to Scotland. Quite literally. Ancestralscotland.com has been created in association with visitscotland, the Scottish tourist board, to offer as much information to people who wish to continue their family research in Scotland and visit the specific towns, villages, islands and communities where, perhaps generations ago, your family lived and worked.
Ancestralscotland.com is a most attractive and welcoming website which is a crucial aspect to encourage people to log on. Genealogy is one of the most popular and growing pastimes, especially for senior citizens and retired people. With time on their hands free from daily employment, thousands of people are becoming immersed in researching their own family history going back hundreds of years to great-great-great grandparents. This kind of personal jigsaw puzzle can be time consuming but may likely become utterly fascinating and an obsessive hobby, as the research throws up hidden stories and unknown connections, places and people.
Where do you begin?
Ancestral research may sound daunting but this website takes you by the hand and leads the way, giving suggested directions, valuable contacts, clearly identified menus, links to other sites and helpful advice. From the first page you are guided to a Getting Started section and you can begin your research right away. Simply type in your surname or perhaps a Scottish placename which is associated with your family. From one single click you have started your journey to find your family history - perhaps also the first step in planning a real journey to visit Scotland if you have now moved away from the land where perhaps your great-grandparents once lived.
This well designed website, with nostalgic sepia-tinted photographs of bygone families, has been expertly and accurately devised by a team of professionals including Tony Reid, a genealogist with the company, Scottish Roots. He has spent a great deal of time researching up to date information on historical records, registers, family and clan societies, archive and record centres, museums and libraries.
Records and Registers
With the collection of all Scottish records of births, marriages and deaths since 1855, New Register House is believed to have exceptional if not the best research facilities in the world. There is clear advice given on the website on how to access what you need from the millions of records stored at New Register House in Edinburgh, both on-line and in person.
Once you have traced a birth certificate of a family member, this leads you directly to the date and place of the parents` marriage and their births. And so the family tree continues to be drawn up.
Copies of your family history are easily accessible with expert advice available to assist your search. If you are unable to visit personally or if you have little time to research, you can employ a professional genealogist for a modest fee.
Before 1855, family records were kept in each local parish as well as the national census records. Expert guidance is given on the website on how to check spellings of surnames, to find parish names and locate other appropriate records and registers.
Census records for 1901 for the England went on line early in 2002, with an unprecedented demand for information. There were so many people logging on, the site was apparently overloaded for a time when it first opened. This only proves once again how popular our interest in social and family history has become. Census records give details on employment, number of children and domestic servants, as well as the number of rooms in the home. The census records for Scotland for 1901 are now also on line - together with those of 1881 and 1891.
From Parish records the Ancestry Scotland site will direct you to the local area tourist boards to help you plan a tour of the specific town or community where your family once lived.
Easy, Accessible and Fun
Scottish Family records go back to as early as 1553 and therefore finding out about your family connections in Scotland, compared to other countries, can be a straightforward, easily accessible and enjoyable task. Maureen Sprott of Visit Scotland has spent more than a year developing this exciting new website which she hopes will entice people to visit Scotland.
"The site will provide up to date information that makes it both easy and essential for people to travel to Scotland in order to put the final piece of their family history puzzle together. If they come to Scotland to see the country for themselves they will experience what it is to be Scottish."
The Scots Abroad
The Scots are everywhere across the world. For generations they have travelled to find employment, to seek adventure, or as missionaries, inventors, engineers, doctors, or for the sake of their health to live in a warmer climate. Either through choice or the Highlands Clearances, thousands emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where their descendants have settled for many generations.
It is estimated that over 28 million people across the world can claim Scottish roots, including many famous people in politics, business and the media. President George Bush, Bill Gates, Tommy Hillfiger and Donald Trump are among numerous well known names who are proud to have Celtic and Caledonian connections.
AncestralScotland has regular updated news reports and features, giving information on future clan gatherings, cultural and arts events, festivals, and fascinating facts and figures about Scotland such as a list of famous Scots around the world, past and present.
The Macleods and Macdonalds, the Gordons and Robertsons wherever they live now, are certainly proud of their links with the homeland. Perhaps it is to do with our rich and romantic history of Kings and Queens, of battles with England and clan warfare, forever a proud nation of independent mind and a glorious and beautiful landscape. Whatever it is, their Scottish blood gives an emotional and nostalgic sense of belonging to a very large family of Scots which is scattered across the world.
Where else would you like to go in Scotland?
