How much research can I do on the web?

There are a lot of extremely useful resources on the web, but none that will give you all the answers you need. You still have to get access to the original documents in some way. The two most important sources on the web for birth, marriage and death information are Scotlandspeople and LDS FamilySearch.

Scotlandspeople is a pay-per-use website and is the official government source for genealogical data for Scotland. It provides access to indexes for the Old Parochial Registers (OPRs), as well as indexes and digitised images of birth certificates over 100 years ago, marriages over 75 years ago and deaths over 50 years ago. It also has the 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901 census online.

FamilySearch is the genealogy web site of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and provides online access to their International Genealogical Index (IGI). In the 1950s and 1960s the LDS had permission to microfilm some, but not all, of the original Scottish Old Parochial Registers (OPRs). The LDS produced an index from these microfilms and added it to the IGI, which is now available online. Some later records, up to about 1875, have also been added. The IGI has also been added to by individuals researching their own families. It is, therefore, important to distinguish between the official records, which should be accurate, and the unofficial ones which may or may not be. To do this, you should check the batch number. If it begins with a "C" or "M", it will be from the official OPRs.

FamilySearch is free and is an excellent place to start, but remember, it is still just an index, it is not complete and you should make sure of accuracy.

For information on other resources for the different Scottish counties, check out the Scottish pages at GENUKI.