The premier resource for tracing your British and Irish ancestors
Help with Scots Origins services

Scots Origins features a Free IGI search, a Free Scottish Place search, and family history articles (see Scotland), and discussion on Scottish history. Select Scots Origins from the top tabs or click here to go to the Scots Origins homepage.

About the IGI

The original indexes to the Old Parish Registers were captured by teams led by the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU), and are included within the International Genealogical Index (IGI) accessible on the Family Search web site. The IGI has indexes to over 90% of the birth and marriage OPRs, and often you will find both birth date and baptism date included there, while the GROS index almost invariably has only one or the other.

Our improved interface to the IGI will allow you to search the Scottish records directly by parish. This is not possible on the Family Search web site.

The GSU also indexed the Statutory Register entries for births and marriages up to 1875. A major advantage of the IGI birth index records is the presence of parents' names; this has been a major weakness in the GROS index. Also, the IGI index has the full date of the event, rather than just the year.

Origins users accessing the IGI search on Scots Origins can now retrieve search results for all names in one particular county and district, by entering the surname only. Alternatively, if you wish to view all the names in a particular parish in a year, this is also now possible on the Scots Origins IGI search. Simply type in the year and parish required and results will be retrieved for all names in that parish in the year chosen.
Scottish place search

Scots Origins offers a FREE search by place allowing users to find which parish and county in which a place is located.

This is an invaluable feature for those wishing to find someone on the census records or just find out where an ancestor's street or town was located. For example, entering a street name will show all parishes in Scotland where that street appears.

See the Place Search on the Scots Origins homepage.