Occasional Paper

Genealogy is a very popular and rapidly growing interest worldwide, with important opportunities for tourism and the cultural heritage. It is estimated that some 28 million people have Scottish roots. One of the General Register Office for Scotland's (GROS) functions is to preserve and make available the records relating to Scotland's births, deaths and marriages over the centuries. This short paper describes the reasons behind, methods and progress so far on the DIGROS (the Digital Imaging of the Genealogical Records of Scotland's people) project, and outline plans for future work. It looks at the pilot project that preceded DIGROS. It then goes on to describe the broad aims of the project, the methods pursued by contractors to index the records and capture them as digital image. It looks at the launch of the images of the 1901 census. It then outlines work currently ongoing with the project and work to be completed before it ends in 2003.