Robin, I have done quite a bit of research on Scotland, and I can highly recommend the Scotland's People site mentioned by others (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk). The only problem with it is it costs money, but not excessive amounts unless you go overboard. It costs 6 pounds for 30 credits, a little less than 2 credits for a dollar. It costs 1 credit to view the results of a search, and 5 credits for an image of the original document. Civil registration started in 1855 in Scotland and seems very complete right from day one. Nominal censuses started in 1841 and were done every 10 years. Prior to 1855, the site relies on Old Parish Records (OPR's) to provide baptism and marriage banns. The OPR's were not standardized and show a lot of variation in what was actually recorded, but most parishes only had very basic info. The amount of surviving records varies from parish to parish as well. The LDS church site www.familysearch.org has many of the OPR records indexed in the IGI section of their website (Go to Search, then International Genealogical Index). Unfortunately, the IGI indexes both member contributed records (which I find somewhat unreliable) and original OPR records. The OPR records can be identified by wording in the source section to the effect that they are original records. To minimize costs, I suggest you do all your OPR searches first in the IGI, and then use the results to get the document images from Scotland's People. If you can't find anything in the IGI, you can do your searches directly in Scotland's People. (For example, I know that there are several parishes where the IGI records only show female births and not male, but Scotland's People has both). BTW, I should mention that the bests results for people living in 1820 come from civil death registrations if they lived past 1855. As I said these records are complete both in terms of people covered and information recorded. The standard information includes occupation, residence, cause of death, the name of both parents (including mother's maiden name), and usually names of all spouses. For women, the records are indexed by maiden name and all married names, which can really help narrow down your searches even if you don't know exactly where or when they died. The only problem with the death records is when the informant doesn't know anything (as often happens when the person dies in the poorhouse). Good Luck. - Bob -----Original Message----- From: can-ont-simcoe-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:can-ont-simcoe-bounces@rootsweb.com]On Behalf Of Robin Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2007 7:20 PM To: SIMCOE Subject: [CAN-ONT-SIMCOE] Scotland Hi Does anyone know of a way to find early baptism and marriage records in Scotland. Ancestry doesn't have much and the only thing I have found are private researchers or pay per view sites. I am willing to pay a subscription for access but the pay per view is not good unless you have a very uncommon name. I went through heaps of pay per view and all it did was cost me money with no results. I am searching prior to 1820. Thanks Robin ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to CAN-ONT-SIMCOE-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message