Wallace , There is a big difference between the word "protestant" and the churches of Scotland. Effectively, ALL churches that are not Roman Catholic are Protestant, so that apart from the Church of Scotland there are the Scottish Episcopal Church of Scotland, The Congregational Union, the Baptists, Unitarian, and all the breakaway denominations which formed (and re-formed) over the years. A Church of Scotland minister years back produced a diagram showing all the splits and joinings, and it was a complicated jigsaw. The main non-C. of S. offshoot denominations today are the Free Church of Scotland, The United Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church, the United Reformed Church, etc. Earlier we had for example the Relief Church and the United Secession Church who amalgamated to become the United Presbyterian Church, which later united with part of the Free Church to become the United Free Church of Scotland. You can get tied in knots just following all the Protestant demoninations! I have not mentioned the Quakers or the Salvation Army, as they were not mainstream nor have they many records useful for genealogy. Take into account that each of these denominations had their own records, and that most have not made it into any online index yet, on cannot rely on any online index to be comprehensive. Being the only solution in an online index does not mean that there are no other people who have not been indexed; in fact a survey done in Glasgow in the 1800s indicated that up to one third of all births never appeared in church records! One is dependent on the completeness of records in one's parish of interest, and that various from pretty good to almost nil. You can use a range of other records to supplement what is available on the IGI and scotlandspeople - the census returns, poor law records (from the 1840s, and just as variable as the church records, though sometimes fantastic in detail), newspapers (though very few are indexed), wills and testaments, sasines (property transfers), estate records, business records, militaryt records, court cases, to name but a few.... I would suggest a trawl through the online National Archives of Scotland <http://www.nas.gov.uk/onlineCatalogue/> (shortly to become the National Records of Scotland) catalogue, as it is becoming a very useful tool. Enough of this lecture....!:-[ Gordon. Wallace Fullerton <[email protected]> asked: For some years I've been trying to pin down the origin of my 4g-grandparents, George Fullerton and Margaret Pirie. Their memorial inscription suggests George was born in or about 1707 and Margaret about 1714. They first show up when their marriage was recorded in 1739 in the OPRs for Dunnichen and Dun, and they lived as the tenants of the Mains of Dun until 1758, after which they relocated with their large family to Benholm in Kincardine. Having gotten nowhere with solid documentation, I am now attempting to encircle the available data and methodically knock off the less-likely possibilities. I've already looked through the IGI (using familysearch.org) for all "George Fullertons" born in the early 1700s - there are only a couple, and only one born in 1707. Now I am searching for all Fullerton marriages in Scotland likely to produce a child in the 1707 time frame - basically from 1690 through 1710. Again there are surprisingly few - maybe 100 or so (including the marriage of the parents of the sole George born in 1707 and another Fullerton marriage in Dunnichen.) I'd be interested in any thoughts this forum might have regarding several questions: 1. Does this methodology have merit? 2. One weakness is that there are sometimes gaps in the data from the OPRs (Dun Parish is missing many years, for example). What else might affect my results? I know that the family was Protestant but what other religious groups might I be missing by relying on the IGI (which is extracted mostly from the OPRs?) 3. How far, geographically, should I be setting my boundaries. Initially I am looking at Fullerton marriages only in the northern portion of Angus and in Kincardine because that's where the known family lived and remained for nearly a century (although spreading considerably further in the third generation.) Was it common for a couple to meet and marry when their families were separated by more than perhaps 15 or 20 miles? The farthest apart I've found so far was a marriage between a Menmuir male and a Laurencekirk female, approximately 20 miles apart. 4. I'd appreciate any ideas on how I might refine this rather coarse approach. Thanks! **********************************