Dear listers I have subscribed just to make this announcement and will be unsubscribing immediately as I have no known Scottish connections in my own research. I have just uploaded my Scotland IGI Middle Name index at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis. This adds Scotland to the English counties for which I have created such an index. I believe that middle names are an invaluable resource for finding clues to family relationships. Strangely I have seen very little written about their use as research pointers in any of the literature, nor have I seen this issue discussed much on the mailing lists. I have not seen any middle name indexes or search tools available anywhere either. BUT - often a person's middle name is the same as the maiden name of their mother or a grandmother or reflects some other familial connection (maybe the name of a patron or benefactor). It may also be the father's surname for births occurring out of wedlock. It seems obvious to me, therefore, that they have significant value in genealogical and family history research. I have found nearly 39,000 different middle names (some of which are obvious transcription errors for each other) appearing in over 780,000 of the christening/birth/adult baptism and marriage records on the IGI for this region. This is out of a total of over 6 million christening/birth/adult baptism and nearly 4 million marriage records (representing half that number of marriages, of course, since there are two records in the IGI for each marriage) for these churches/chapels. This is all of the entries in the IGI for Scotland that have been extracted as part of the controlled extraction program. I have not yet checked the parents' names on the baptism records for additional middle names - that is a much longer task which I may or may not be able to do. As always a warning about using the IGI is necessary. It is ONLY an index and is full of transcription errors. However it has been a mammoth undertaking on the part of the LDS and is an invaluable aid to research. Nevertheless, it bears repeating that there is no substitute for viewing the original records (or at least fiche or film of them). The IGI does assist you in locating those records and so narrowing down your area of search. Hugh Wallis Ontario, Canada Formerly of Surrey, UK OPC - Stoke Damerel, Devon - [email protected] - http://stokedamerelopc.org Stoke Damerel Baptism lookups - http://stokedamerelopc.org/baptism_lookup_request.htm Stoke Damerel Burial lookups - http://stokedamerelopc.org/burial_lookup_request.htm Plymouth Area post-1837 Church Marriages Middle Name lookups - http://stokedamerelopc.org/marriage_lookup_request.htm IGI Middle Name search (all of Devon) - http://stokedamerelopc.org/middle_names_from_the_igi.htm IGI Batch numbers, Middle Names etc - http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis