Venita There are ways of doing judicious searches on Scotlandspeople without spending too many credits. One strategy is to make your search criteria as broad as possible and getting as many hits as possible for 1 credit and then narrowing it down before paying for an image download. The other strategy which I employ is to use very broad search criteria which can then be narrowed down by either parish and/or year. I may start off with about 40 or 60 hits but by progressively narrowing down the criteria this can be reduced to one name, one parish and one year. Only then do I use any credits. This can be time consuming but as long as you keep notes of your fruitless searches it can save you money. I may have left Aberdeen 52 years ago but I still have my Aberdonian instincts when it comes to counting my bawbees! regards George George Brander Torre de la Horadada España On 29 March 2014 21:30, <leshorn@ythanonich.freeserve.co.uk> wrote: > Venita said > > >It's too bad there isn't an option for a subscription. I believe it > would draw more people to the collection if there were. . . Shall we start > a campaign? > > I'm afraid that SAFHS (Scottish Association of Family History Societies), > which represents the Scottish FHSs, has for years been pressuring GROS > (General Registry Office Scotland) for the introduction of an Annual > Subscription to no avail. Besides being tied by legislation - it is in the > will of the Scottish Parliament to change the legislation - there seems to > be little will to introduce it. > > Of course Brightsolid, in their current guise, who operate SP on behalf of > the Scottish Government would not make as much 'profit' if they introduced > it. Despite this they do have Subscriptions to their other sites eg > FindMyPast. > > Regards > Les > Sent from my BlackBerry(R) wireless device > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > ABERDEEN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >

On 29 March 2014 21:14, George Brander <george.brander@gmail.com> wrote: > > There are ways of doing judicious searches on Scotlandspeople without > spending too many credits. > One strategy is to make your search criteria as broad as possible and > getting as many hits as possible for 1 credit and then narrowing it down > before paying for an image download. > The other strategy which I employ is to use very broad search criteria > which can then be narrowed down by either parish and/or year. I may start > off with about 40 or 60 hits but by progressively narrowing down the > criteria this can be reduced to one name, one parish and one year. Only > then do I use any credits. Venita There is one point in George Brander's email that I don't do myself. I agree with him about narrowing the search down to one person if you can by choosing parishes/parents/dates etc. However I would then expand the search by expanding the dates within the parish to encompass as many other members of the family as possible up to 25, or 50, 75, etc, aiming for a total of hits that gives you as close as possible to full pages of hits. By doing this each set of up to 25 cost 1 credit but you may well find other family members in the hit-list. I did that very early on and it gave us a clue about an ancestor because his eldest daughter got married within a few days of him marrying his third wife. It solved a problem in the Census returns, too detailed to go into here. The basic lesson is that a page of hits costs the same for the one hit or 25 hits so gather as much data for your 1 credit as you can. Be lucky Ray