Fiona's Finding Service

Have you traced your descent back to an ancestor born in Scotland ? (e.g. your parents, or the ancestor who emigrated)
Would you like to trace further back from that person ?
Have you tried the index on ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk (formerly ScotsOrigins.com) or the IGI and not found sufficient details ?
Or found multiple ambiguous entries for common names ? (VERY expensive on pay-per-view)
Maybe your ancestors were not Church of Scotland ? (There were many other Prebyterian denominations, let alone all the other ones)
Are you trying to trace living cousins ?
Do you want information on more recent births, deaths and marriages than they have available online ?
Do you want to search wills, property transfers, gravestone inscriptions, electoral rolls, street directories, criminal records, or other information not available online ?
Or any other information that can only be obtained from paper documents kept in Edinburgh ?
Or do you know who your ancestors were, but would like a bit more background information about their lives ?
Are you unable to spend a long holiday in Edinburgh patiently searching through the records yourself ?

If so, you need Fiona's Finding Service (established 1997)

My name is Fiona Sinclair. I am a qualified researcher with 20 years experience.
Not only are the Birth, Marriage and Death records for the whole of Scotland kept in Edinburgh, but also considerable other records in various archives in other parts of the city. For many of these it is necessary to be there in order to browse through them - you can only ask for a copy of something if you already know about it. The staff do not usually do browsing searches, but will only search for something specific, at a price.
Copies of some of these records may be found elsewhere (the BM&D may be online or in the regional archives), but there is nowhere else in the world where ALL of the records are to be found in neighbouring buildings, allowing rapid cross-checking of ambiguities, etc.

Using my service is cheaper than travelling to Edinburgh yourself and spending several days (or weeks) searching all the records in different parts of the city. (First finding out what is kept where).
You need a ticket to get into some archives (e.g. the National Library), and have to pay an annual subscription for others.
I will not waste your money doing searches that you could have done yourself over the Internet (unless you ask me to check them), but concentrate on those that you need to be here to do.
For the same price as ordering a small number of certificates from ScotlandsPeople, I can locate and copy out the information on a far larger number of your ancestors, (including those which they have not put online), plus fill in a lot of background information about the places where they lived.

What you need to supply:

You will have to supply me with details about an ancestor who was born in Scotland. (This can be yourself).
These may possibly be obtained from the immigration records in your country, which may give names, parents names, date and place of birth, occupation, etc.
If you do not have exact details, it might still be possible to trace your ancestor, but it would be more difficult, more time-consuming (i.e. expensive), and you would have to know some other means of identification, such as stories passed down in the family about life in the old country, forenames passed down, etc. (Remember that the stories told to grandchildren about life in the old country might not turn out to be entirely true).
The Scottish child-naming traditions ensured that there were always a number of cousins with exactly the same name, born in the same parish during the same decade. Looking for that name, date and place on the IGI or ScotlandsPeople may give you the wrong one.

Send me as many details as you have by email, and I will tell you

See also
  • My service - how it differs from others available
  • Results - what you can expect to find, realistically
  • Fees
  • Certificates - what is on them
  • Common problems when trying to do it yourself
  • Method - examples of what the work might involve
  • Examples of some of my previous cases
  • Links My email address is e-mail to:fnsnclr@gmail.com

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    e-mail to:fnsnclr@gmail.com