The family history website, ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, celebrates its tenth
birthday in September 2012.
Officially launched in mid-September 2002, ScotlandsPeople was one of the first
genealogy sites to arrive on the web. The site now contains over 90 million
digital records and corresponding images, and adds new sets of fully-searchable
historical records on a regular basis.
With over one million registered users from
across the world, the website remains the biggest online resource for Scottish
census, birth, marriage and death records. The website has evolved through a
decade of huge technological growth and in a time where interest in genealogy
has soared.
Chris van der Kuyl, the CEO of brightsolid, the company that enables
ScotlandsPeople for the National Records of Scotland, said:
‘ScotlandsPeople was our first ever family history website, and our partnership
with the National Records of Scotland has undoubtedly enabled brightsolid to
expand our business to become one of the world's leading publishers of online
genealogy.
‘When the Scotlandspeople website was launched back in 2002, we were truly
leading the way, offering a unique online product for family historians. We are
immensely proud of how ScotlandsPeople has evolved over the last decade. We
continue to add exciting new data sets and innovative search techniques to the
site, making family history research easier and more accessible around the
globe.’
George MacKenzie, Registrar General and the Keeper at the National Records of
Scotland, said:
‘ScotlandsPeople has gone from strength to strength since its launch ten years
ago. I am delighted that in our special birthday year we'll be enhancing this
very popular resource for Scottish family history by adding hundreds of
thousands of new wills from 1902 to 1925.’
