Morning all from a very warm and sunny Scottish Highlands. In answer to the query and to confirm what others have said. On the Scotlands' People website (the government run one) you buy credits in blocks of 30 each block costing £6. There is no extra charge if you pay by credit rather than debit card which is quite unusual nowadays. You don’t need to buy credits to do searches but you do to view the results. The one partial exception is wills where you will see a list of all the relevant wills but not their contents. My advice is to use SP in conjunction with Family Search or another free source in order to try and narrow down as much as possible the potential for wrong entries coming up in your results. The Scotlands People (SP) gives access to all birth, death and marriage entries from 1855 but you cannot download any of the more recent images which may still cover living people. The search result will still give you details of the entry etc so you can order it up from Register house. Recently I did a search of a well known TV and musical actor from Glasgow now living in America whom I understand to be a distant cousin and identified his parents marriage and his and his father's birth details in seconds but will wait until I am next in New Register House before viewing the actual entries. SP also gives access to all the OPR records but remember "death" entries before 1855 are few and far between and are more often than not Mortcloth journal entries for the deceased's family renting the parish shroud for the funeral. Similarly the detail on baptisms (because it is not births which are recorded pre 1855) and marriages varies hugely. We forget the purpose of those registers was not to provide genealogical information centuries later to potential descendants. It was to record the damnation or otherwise of people by the church for having children in or out with marriage and to extract cash for recognising irregular marriages which were the norm. A great many ordinary people simply could not afford to pay the fees to record entries or moved around so often that they never got round to registering things. It is generally the settled, well behaved residents of the parish who find their way into the OPR. In many parts of the country, mothers were considered irrelevant so for example in large parts of the Highlands, the mother of a child is never mentioned in the baptism records, a huge problem for those of us with Caithness blood. Some OPR detail both parents, father's occupation, godparents/witness details and where the family lived. Others like most Caithness ones simply list the child of the father who lived in a certain place and the date of baptism. A great many do not detail the date of birth though generally birth was only a few days before baptism. The date occurring in Family Search is usually the baptism date. SP also lets you search up to the 1901 census. For all of these to see the result costs 1 credit per page of results so if your search is too wide, it might cost several credits to view all the pages before you can properly decide which image to purchase a download for. In places like Glasgow it can be a nightmare because families moved around parishes regularly or indeed the parishes simply moved as the city grew and there was a need to create more parishes. In addition remember places like Partick, Scotstoun, Rutherglen and Renfrew etc were separate towns until just after 1900 even though most are now correctly or incorrectly thought of as part of the City of Glasgow. When you decide to select an entry to look at, it will cost you 5 credits. That will then offer you the opportunity to open a link and on doing so my advice is to save the open document to your PC first and then print it out. If it turns out not to be the correct entry, firstly think about mentioning its details on places like the relevant Rootsweb list or some of the free search sites which rely on people sharing details of certificates which are usually not the ones they wanted. At all costs do not click the button for previous or next image. This will not take you back to the list so you can choose again. It will show the previous or next page on the actual register to the one you were just looking at! Unless there is a faster way I have not found, you need to go into the previous searches index and click to open the search again but because you have already paid your 1,2 etc credits, you will have free access in the future to the results of that search again. Sometimes going back after several years can be useful. If you are searching an unusual surname, it can be cost effective to try a wide search in the hope you might find other family members in the resulting list. This is especially the case with the wills search. As I said searching the wills index is free and if for example you only type in a surname, you should get a list of All wills for people with that name. For completeness I might add that the list also contains all those for whom a court has awarded Confirmation (Probate in the English world) so many of those listed will be people who had property but died intestate, i.e. without a will. Some people will also feature several times. If you see the word "Eik" that means additional estate has been identified and the family/executor has required to return to court to get additional authority to ingather this extra estate. Occasionally it can also be used to correct an error in relation to property, e.g. where some of the deceased's property listed in his estate was in fact that of someone else. When I do a will search, I usually cut and paste the entire results page(s) into a new Word document and save it. I promise in the years ahead you will go back and look at it time and time again. Last week looking at one for some ancestors in the 1600s in Edinburgh with an unusual surname led me to a published book which mentions generations of the family and the estate they owned just outside Edinburgh. It will also hopefully confirm another 4 generations in that line of my maternal ancestry taking them back to the reign of James V. Looking at Wills/Testamentary records is expensive. They are £5 per page. However in some cases they can give stunning results. I have downloaded wills for ancestors in Glasgow from 1610 and 1626 and the latter was unusual because it was the wife's will. So really Scotlands' People can be fantastic and quick but unless you plan its use carefully and are realistic about what it offers, it can prove costly and frustrating. Cheers Mark