In the beginning...there was a dot matrix print-out

 

At some point after 1994 and prior to 2002, my Dad gave me a two page dot matrix print-out of the ‘Roy’ family tree that he had painstakingly compiled on a computer. At the left hand side of the first page were the names ‘WILLIAM ROY m. Margaret Campbell’, a horizontal line linked them to their son and his wife, ‘WILLIAM ROY (1846-1918) m. Isabella Sutherland (1845-1914), and from there the lines split into William and Isabella’s eight children and subsequent generations. 

At that point in time, seven descending generations were recorded from William and Margaret, (my great-great-great-grandparents) through to the first children of my generation.  It had been compiled the ‘traditional’ way - based on memory, my Dad consulting various family members, and using known records. I kept that print-out in a folder in my filing cabinet.

In 2002, I became aware that genealogical research was rapidly advancing on the Internet, and I started investigating what records were available on-line. I pulled the Roy family tree out of the filing cabinet and used it as a starting point. 

Prior to the Internet, family historians had to laboriously trawl through original parish documents at local record offices to uncover long-forgotten birth, baptism, marriage and death details of earlier generations, or mail off requests to record offices to printed certificates to be received by mail. From 1973 (still pre-Internet times) some genealogists could consult the International Genealogical Index (IGI) on microfiche - which was a project of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) to aid their members trace their ancestors. The original IGI was available to public users in microfiche format in the mid-1980s and contained about 108 million entries which had been complied from original historical documents. By the late 1990s a CD-ROM version was available and there was over 200 million entries. In 1999, the FamilySearch website (the LDS family history website) was created and IGI entries were gradually released online by region…which is the point at which I became aware of this.1

One of the datasets the IGI had at that time was the Old Parochial Records of Scotland (OPR) - which are the records of the established Church of Scotland including registers of births/baptisms, marriages and/or proclamations of banns and (sometimes) deaths or burials. Coverage of each parish varies greatly depending on what original documents have survived, but at the extremes, records date from the late 1500s through to 31 December 1854 (when Scotland’s statutory registration took over).2 

Nowadays, the best place to search and view the OPR is the official Government Scotland’s People website which has the original images available for viewing and download (at a cost), but Scotland’s People didn’t exist in 2002.

So, armed with the original print-out of the Roy family tree and a lot of patience, I explored the search functions of the IGI, and slowly started piecing together further details. It was the start of an addiction. It’s now been almost 20 years since those first experimental searches on the IGI, and genealogy on the Internet has exploded dramatically, with digital access now available to Scottish datasets a lone researcher half a world away could only dream about back in the 'noughties'. 

Over that time I have plugged away at various twigs on the family tree, returning often to the original Roy branch and fleshing out its various characters. It’s the stories of our ancestors that draw me in to family history research. The names, places and dates are the scaffolding, but it’s the detail of their lives that really fascinates me. On this blog I aim to capture some of these ancestral stories to pass on to family members present and future.   

Confused about where these characters fit into the family tree? Or where this action is occurring? You can always check  The Family Tree and Map pages for visual clues. 

Footnotes

1. Familysearch, 'International Genealogical Index', https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/International_Genealogical_Index, accessed 27 January 2022.

2. National Records of Scotland, Tracing your Scottish Ancestors: The Official Guide, 7th edn, Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh, 2021, p.33.