Hi all,

My real Scottish connection is through my great grandfather and my parents haven't been very useful in providing a lot of information about him. After a couple of years of "oh I'm sure we have some records somewhere" I have decided that I will need to bypass them.

Sadly there is no family left alive on that side of my family tree save my Mother.

I started today looking online with the (probably) stupid idea that government records (birth, death, census info, military registration) would be easy to search. It seems that pretty much everywhere I look eventually links to Ancestry.com.

For those of you out there who are experienced in these kinds of searches, should I bite the bullet and sign up or are there better ways of looking into these records?

Thanks in advance for any advice

Cheers

Jamie