ScotlandsPeople: A Guide to Scottish Family History Records
ScotlandsPeople (scotlandspeople.gov.uk, now styled Scotland’s People) is the official Scottish Government website for Scottish family history. It is run by National Records of Scotland (NRS) and holds the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths from 1855, the Church of Scotland Old Parish Registers before that, Catholic and other church registers, census returns from 1841 to 1921, valuation rolls and wills and testaments from 1513 to 1925.
Searching the indexes is free. You pay only to view and save the images of the entries, using credits worth 25p each. Scottish registers usually give more detail than their English equivalents: a birth entry normally names the parents’ date and place of marriage, and every death entry names both parents of the deceased.
How ScotlandsPeople works and what it costs
You need to register a free account to buy credits and save images, but the name indexes can be searched without paying anything. The search results show enough to judge whether an entry is the right one: name, year, registration district and, for some records, age or a spouse’s name. When you open the image, credits are deducted from your balance.
At the time of writing (September 2026), the official charges page lists these costs:
| Record | Credits | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Statutory births, marriages and deaths (open years), census returns, church registers | 6 | £1.50 |
| Wills and testaments, soldiers’ and airmen’s wills | 10 | £2.50 |
| Valuation rolls | 2 | £0.50 |
| Saving a page from Virtual Volumes (kirk sessions and church courts) | 2 | £0.50 |
Credits are valid for two years from purchase and expire if unused. Save every image you pay for to your own computer as well as to your account: the terms state that saved images deleted from the account cannot be recovered.
Statutory registers from 1855: births, marriages and deaths
Civil registration began in Scotland on 1 January 1855, eighteen years later than in England and Wales. From that date registration was compulsory for everyone, whatever their religion. The indexes run from 1855 to the present day, but they are arranged by year of registration, not by the date of the event, so widen your search by a year either side.
What a Scottish birth entry gives you
A birth entry normally records the child’s name, sex, date, time and place of birth, the father’s name and occupation, the mother’s name and maiden surname, the date and place of the parents’ marriage, and the informant. The parents’ marriage details were not recorded in 1856 to 1860, so check those years in the marriage indexes instead. Entries for 1855 are the most detailed of all: they add the parents’ ages and birthplaces and the other children of the marriage.
What a marriage entry gives you
A marriage entry records the date and place, both parties’ names, occupations, ages, marital status and usual residences, the name and occupation of each party’s father, the name and maiden surname of each mother, the form of the marriage (for example after banns, or by declaration), and the witnesses. Only the 1855 entries also record birthplaces and former marriages.
What a death entry gives you
A death entry gives the name, occupation, marital status and spouse, the date, time and place of death, age, cause of death and the certifying doctor, the informant, and the names of both parents, with the mother’s maiden surname. This is the main difference from an English death certificate, which names neither parent. The 1855 death entries add the birthplace and the children of the deceased.
Corrections and closed years
A Register of Corrected Entries (RCE) records later changes, such as a father’s name added after a court decree or after the parents married. The index flags these, so always open the RCE as well as the original entry.
To protect privacy, images appear online only after a set period, and each year’s images are added the following January:
| Event | Images online after | Online in September 2026 up to |
|---|---|---|
| Births | 100 years | 1925 |
| Marriages | 75 years | 1950 |
| Deaths | 50 years | 1975 |
For later events you order an official certificate from NRS (check the current fee on the ScotlandsPeople certificate page), or view the image in person at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh.
Before 1855: Old Parish Registers and other church records
The Old Parish Registers (OPRs) are the registers of the Church of Scotland before 1855. The oldest, from Errol in Perthshire, begins in 1553, but many parishes started much later and some remote areas only have registers from the early nineteenth century. At best a baptism names the child, the date of birth or baptism, the father, the mother with her maiden surname, the place of residence and the father’s occupation. Banns and marriages usually give only the couple’s names and parishes, and burials were kept very unevenly.
Coverage was patchy. NRS notes that in some urban parishes as few as 30% of events were recorded, because many families never paid to register. Secession and Free Church families, and Catholics, are often missing from the OPRs altogether.
- Catholic registers: about 700 registers survive, the earliest from 1703, though most begin between the 1790s and 1829. They cover the Scottish Catholic parishes in existence by 1855, Glasgow’s Catholic cemetery and the Roman Catholic Bishopric of the Forces, and include baptisms, marriages, confirmations and burials.
- Other Presbyterian churches: registers of congregations that left or rejoined the Church of Scotland, from 1716, are being added to the site.
- Kirk session records: minutes of the local church courts from 1560 onwards, covering discipline cases (often about illegitimate births), poor relief and schools. They are not indexed by name but can be browsed free in the Virtual Volumes section.
For the English equivalent, see our guide to parish registers in England and Wales.
Census returns, valuation rolls and wills
Census returns for Scotland survive every ten years from 1841 to 1921 as enumerators’ books (the household schedules were destroyed). They are indexed by name on ScotlandsPeople, including the 1921 census. The questions match those in England and Wales, which our census guide explains.
Valuation rolls were local tax lists compiled from 1855 under the Lands Valuation (Scotland) Act 1854. They name the owner and the occupier of each property. ScotlandsPeople has indexes and images for 1855, 1865, 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935 and 1940, which fills the gap between censuses and helps trace a family in the 1920s and 1930s.
Wills and testaments from 1513 to 1925 are indexed online, with over 611,000 entries. A testament testamentar is for someone who left a will; a testament dative is for someone who died without one. Both include an inventory of moveable property. Testaments from 1925 to 1999 are not digitised and are consulted at NRS in Edinburgh through the printed yearly Calendar of Confirmations. The Scottish system differs from probate in England and Wales, covered in our probate guide.
How to search ScotlandsPeople step by step
- Start with the most recent open record you can identify, usually a death or marriage, because it names both parents.
- Search the statutory index by surname, forename, year range and, if known, the registration district. Remember that years are years of registration.
- Try variant spellings and search by surname alone when a forename might have been recorded differently, for example Mary as Marion or a Gaelic form.
- Open the image and note every name, age, address and witness before moving on. Save the image to your computer.
- Use the parents’ marriage date on a birth entry, or the parents’ names on a death entry, to find the previous generation.
- Before 1855, move to the OPRs and Catholic registers, then to census returns from 1841 and 1851 for birthplaces.
- Add context from valuation rolls, testaments and kirk session minutes.
Commercial sites such as Ancestry, Findmypast and MyHeritage hold transcripts of some Scottish indexes and census returns, but the images of the Scottish statutory registers are on ScotlandsPeople. The free FamilySearch catalogue can also help with older parish material. Our overview of free genealogy websites in the UK compares the options.
Visiting the ScotlandsPeople Centre and local centres
The ScotlandsPeople Centre is in HM General Register House, 2 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH1 3YY. At the time of writing (September 2026) it opens from 9:00 to 16:00, Monday to Friday except public holidays, you must book a seat online in advance, and a day pass costs £15. Printing costs 25p a page. The Centre gives access to all the digitised records and indexes, including modern entries that are still closed online, so it is the place to see a marriage from the 1950s or a death from the 1980s without ordering certificates one by one.
Several local authority centres offer a version of ScotlandsPeople: the Burns Monument Centre in Kilmarnock, Clackmannanshire Family History Centre in Alloa, the Heritage Hub in Hawick, the Highland Archive Service Family History Centre in Inverness and Family History at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Check opening times and charges with each centre before you travel.
Polish soldiers in Scotland: finding them in Scottish records
Scottish records matter for many Polish families in Britain. After the fall of France in 1940, Polish troops evacuated to Britain were concentrated in Scotland, where the 1st Polish Corps was formed and helped build and man coastal defences. The 1st Polish Armoured Division, under General Stanisław Maczek, was raised and trained in Scotland in 1942 before fighting in Normandy in 1944. In Edinburgh the Polish School of Medicine, set up in March 1941 by the university with the Polish Government, taught in Polish until 1949: 227 students graduated there and most stayed in Britain.
Many soldiers married Scottish women. From 1 July 1940 civil marriage before a registrar became possible under the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1939, and ScotlandsPeople has highlighted marriages of Polish, Norwegian and Canadian servicemen in 1942. Because marriage images are online up to 1950, most wartime and early post-war Polish-Scottish marriages can be viewed today.
What the marriage entry tells you
The marriage entry is often the single best British source for a Polish soldier. It gives his age, his occupation or rank, and, crucially, his father’s name and occupation and his mother’s name with her maiden surname. The form of the marriage shows whether a Catholic priest or a registrar performed it. A Scottish marriage entry after 1855 does not normally give a birthplace, so expect names and ages rather than a Polish village.
An illustrative example (not a real person): a 1943 entry for Jan Kowalczyk, 27, a lance corporal in the Polish Army, names his father as Józef Kowalczyk, farmer, and his mother as Maria Kowalczyk, maiden surname Nowak. The age gives an approximate birth year of 1915 or 1916, and the parents’ names are the details a Polish parish or civil register will confirm.
Pitfalls with Polish names
- Registrars wrote what they heard: Wojciechowski may appear as Voitsekhovski or Wojciechowsky, and the Polish letters ł, ś and ż are usually lost. Our guide to anglicised Polish surnames lists common patterns.
- Mothers’ maiden surnames may be given in the feminine form (Nowakówna, Kowalska) or the masculine form.
- Ages given by soldiers were not always accurate, so allow a few years either way.
- Deaths from 1976 onwards are closed online: order a certificate or visit the Centre.
The next Polish record
Use the names from the Scottish entry to request or read the soldier’s service file. His Polish Army record, held by the Ministry of Defence, normally gives his exact date and place of birth: see our guide to Polish service records held by the MOD. With the place and the parents’ names you can then look for the birth or baptism in Poland, as explained in finding a birth entry in Poland. For the wider story of Poles who stayed, start at our Polish Britain section.