brightsolid hails addition of Catholic records to ScotlandsPeople website
The addition of the Scottish Catholic Archives – including details of French Royal post revolution refugees and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s family tree – to the successful ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk website has been welcomed by the site’s operator, brightsolid.
The additional data, including information from hundreds of volumes of births and baptisms from the Scottish Catholic Archives, was announced today (Tuesday, October 6) by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.
The records, dating from 1703 to 1908, are the latest key historical documents to be added to the ScotlandsPeople site, which now has more than 1m registered users, a figure that is rising by around 10,000 each month.
brightsolid, the Scottish headquartered online publishing business, recently won a new three-year deal to manage ScotlandsPeople, which contains more than 80 million of the most important Scottish records including all census and statutory birth, death and marriage records from 1855. It also includes parish records, dating back as far as 1533, and other data including wills and testaments.
“This is a fantastic addition to ScotlandsPeople and for the Keeper of Records,” commented brightsolid chief executive Chris van der Kuyl.
“The Catholic Archives cover key moments in European history, including the flight of the French Royals. They will throw a great deal of light on the growth of Catholic communities in Scotland, and also the significant immigration from Ireland that followed the 1840s’ famine, as well as other periods of history.
“We are expecting a surge of interest in the Catholic records, as they provide massive amounts of new information about people, as well as acting as a useful reference point in Scotland’s history.”
The two year project adds an extra 143,000 pages and two million new names to the 80 million already on the database.
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