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.’
I first downloaded a death cert. from S.P on 3rd Sept 2002 and have used it regularly ever since. A brilliant site.