Groundbreaking Family Tree Project Under Way

25th January 2001

Scots celebrating Burns Night at home and abroad will soon have more comprehensive access to their family histories, thanks to a cutting-edge computer project initiated by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS).

A Dingwall-based company, Highland CAD Ltd., has begun work on converting the historical records of Scottish births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and open census records to digital images, which will then be accessible on computer (including Burns's birth/baptism and irregular marriage entry to Jean Armour!).

Over the next 2 years, these images will be linked to individual computer name indexes and placed on the GROS web-site, so they can be looked up at the click of a mouse across the globe. It is hoped that this will help to promote interest in Scotland from the Scottish diaspora, estimated at 28 million people world-wide, and will lead to an increase in tourism.

Registrar General for Scotland Mr John Randall said:

"I am delighted to announce that this pioneering genealogy project is now under way. There is growing interest in tracing family roots and this initiative will make it much quicker and potentially cheaper to do so.

Once it is up and running, expatriate Scots anywhere in the world will be able to use a personal or laptop computer to research their family history, possibly as far back as the 16th century. I've no doubt that having done this, many will want to visit the places where their roots lie.

To the best of our knowledge, this project makes Scotland the world leader in the use of information technology for genealogical research. As far as we know, no other country in the world is in a position to make such a comprehensive database about its people, past and present, so readily available."

GROS was the very first government department in the UK to get involved in e-commerce. Currently, their pay-per view Scots Origins web-site makes available just the indexes to historical records via the Internet, so that customers can then order extracts online. Now the Scottish Executive has given £3 million funding for the next phase, to be called the Digital Imaging the Genealogical Records of Scotland's People (DIGROS) programme. This will enhance greatly the genealogical searching service. The first priority of DIGROS will be to undertake the imaging and indexing of the closed 1901 census for Scotland. These census records will be released to the public by January 2002.

Notes To News Editors

1. The General Register Office for Scotland (GROS), headed by the Registrar General for Scotland, is a Government Department, established by Act of Parliament in 1854. GROS is an Associated Department of The Scottish Executive and forms part of the Scottish Administration. One of the functions of GROS is to make available its vast genealogical database to members of the public.

2. Highland Cad Limited, based in Dingwall, will convert several million records, currently held on microfilm and microfiche, to digital images. Morse Group has been awarded the contract to supply the hardware on which the digitised records will be stored and made accessible to members of the public. The contracts, with a combined value of around £1.5million, have been awarded following a competitive tender exercise.

3. The project follows a successful pilot in which 250,000 pages of the 1891 Scottish census returns were converted to digital images and linked to 4 million individual computer index entries.

4. The Scots Origins site (www.origins.net) was set up in April 1998. By the beginning of its second year of operation, sales of historical records, such as birth certificates, were running at double the previous level. GROS now averages over 800 extract certificate orders a week from the Internet alone, which accounts for over 50% of all its certificate sales.