Event at General Register House for people with Scottish roots

DH would have loved to be at this! Holidays usually include at least a few days in Edinburgh at Register House (for him) giving me the chance to catch up with friends and do lunch or drink coffee in that little very nice JL restaurant looking down to the Forth.

Sounds really interesting -why are interesting things always on at dates and times I can't attend. Hope it goes well elegran

Scotland's People is a first rate website. Really easy to use and a very clever search facility.

I haven't been on it - partly because I don't understand how the credit system works.
Anya can you explain?

I just worked my way through it. The website does explain it in a straightforward way. You buy so many credits first then use them up as you go along. Its horrendously easy to burn up lots of these credits as you open up various new docs but it is all explained as you go along. It makes you really think about which docs to open. You can store docs you've opened or even save them to your own pc. I recommend you have a go on a dull wet day. Its quite compulsive!

I just found this

"Access to statutory, OPR, Catholic parish register and census indexes costs £7 GBP.
For this fee, you will receive 30 "page credits" which are valid for 1 full year.
Viewing a page of index results costs 1 credit and each page will contain up to 25 search results. Viewing an image costs 5 credits (equivalent to £1.17 GBP).
Your session begins when payment has been authorised and additional credits may be purchased in £7 GBP increments.

The session will restart with each new credit purchase."

This last bit is where I get lost! What does it mean?

It means that if you buy more credits (actually it is when you buy more, because you always run out while there are still things to look at!)your year restarts from that date.

Meaning your "page credits" left are still valid for another year?

No, because you won't have any left if you are buying more....the ones you buy are again valid for a year?

If you get a bit ahead of yourself and buy before the last lot run out, the old ones too will date from when you buy the new ones. It can be useful if you have not had time to use the old ones up, but plan to do more later on, which would be too late for them. It does mean that you can end up with a double batch to use up at the last minute if you don't get a round tuit next year either - but c'est la vie.

Ah, this begins to make sense.
Good setup to get people to buy more sooner.......

Do you find that you make a lot of wrong buys?

Wrong buys of what, credits or views of pages?

Credits get used up eventually, so are not wasted, unless you run out of time. With practice you get better at guessing from the meagre details in the index which entries are more likely to be relevant, but you do sometimes have to look at a lot of toads before you find your prince. Sometimes your prince seems to have married perfectly legally, but was never born and never died (even when his wife remarried a few years after his last recorded census appearance. I think he is under the patio).

There is a law of diminishing returns too, so the more you find out the fewer of the ones that are left belong to your lot. Never throw anything out, though. Save it or print it out and file it under "Maybe". A link may surface in the future. And keep a note of the pages you didn't find anyone at all of the right name on, to save you repeating the same fruitless exercise.

I agree with Elegran you do get used to sorting the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
I had my grandmother's birth certificate so knew the name of her parents, quite easy to find. The generation prior to that took me ages as my g.g. Grandmother was Jane on the census return of 1881 but Janet on previous ones. Wasted quite a few credits, not to mention hours on that one.
Be prepared to become totally absorbed.
I used to drop DGS at school at 8.45 and suddenly realise it was 3.00 and time to pick him up again. I had spent all day in front of the computer and never a dish washed.
I am one eighth Scottish and very proud of it. On my mothers side I am one eighth Irish and that's a whole other story, though equally proud of that bit of my ancestry. No Welsh bits yet.

Thanks for tips Elegran.

I'm a mongrel....Scottish, Irish, Welsh and slightly less English!
British, I guess.