How do I trace back my bloodline back?

Question:

How do I trace back my bloodline back?

I want to trace my bloodline back to my antient scottish heritage.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It's an honorable undertaking. But my first question to you is: Are you able to visit Scotland to find the records that you need?

What you will find with all of the online resources is that they do not have the records transcribed from the 19th century yet. They are not reliably set up for records more than 500 years old. The oldest records that I know of that are fully digitized are from the Dutch archives.

What that means for you is that you can follow many of the online resources as far back as they'll go for you, but once you hit that barrier you'll have to turn to the three major resources we have that take us back farther.

First you need to track probate records. This is obviously only helpful if your family owned property, but that's much more likely in Scotland than it would be in continental Europe. Probate records can be ordered via mail, but will be slow in coming and you can spend 3 years waiting for them all to come because you have to request them by specific name of the decedent, the year of death and place of death. You won't get that until you find the first record. Then you have to write for the second record and wait for that. The only way to cut this down is to either hire someone (which will cost thousands of dollars) or go over there for 2 weeks and research them in person.

The second set of records you'll need (and they'll only take you back to the 14th century) are church records. They're terribly overlooked by researchers who want everything to be on the internet. The reality is that many of the records are filmed by the LDS and you can order those films from the US. But when you get back far enough, you need to contact individual parishes and have them pull the records by hand. Those books are priceless and cared for meticulously. Few of the books pre-1700 are filmed for just that reason...the filming destroys the books.

The third set of records that you'll need will be peerage records. Many of these are published for famous people. But for lesser known nobles, etc. they are archived in nice buildings in the UK, but they are not and probably never will be available online. As records keep finding their way out of private collections and onto the internet, the archivists around the world are becoming increasingly protective of their records. You will need to take a trip to view them.

This does not mean that your task is overwhelming. But it does mean that you will need to spend time in your family's homeland to accomplish your goal. But the upside is that it means you can also visit their homes, find their graves, pray in their chapels and understand who they were and how they lived.

I wish you luck on your journey...