Preface
__________________________________
Note to third edition (from a note left by K.V.C.)

So here we are! A third edition of Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry. A great many things have changed since I wrote the introduction to the first edition twelve years ago. In those days few people possessed a personal computer. In these days few people do not. In those days few people were familiar with a web site (except perhaps Robert the Bruce). In these days few people are not.

Foreword
By the late Professor Emeritus Gordon Donaldson, CBE
HM Historiographer in Scotland
__________________________________
Ancestor hunting has been very much a growth industry in recent years and is by no means confined to Scotland. Yet its scale may have been exceptional there, perhaps because of the enormous emigration from Scotland which began on some scale in the seventeenth century and reached its peak after World War II. Scattered in every part of the globe there are many millions – which would not surely be an underestimate of people of Scottish extraction. Therefore numbers alone are enough to explain the vast amount of activity related to Scottish ancestry.

Introduction
__________________________________
'Is it upon record, or else reported successively from age to age?' asked the Prince of Wales in Shakespeare's Richard III. Pooh Bah, the Lord High Everything Else, in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado had no such doubts. He knew his background: 'I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I cannot help it. I was born sneering.'
Leslie Hodgson, 2003

1
Local History and Genealogy in Scotland
__________________________________
The local historian and the family historian, these days, have a great deal in common. There was a time when neither local history nor genealogy had a wide appeal, but more and more people are interested in knowing something about the background of their ancestors. They are keen to find out where their ancestors had lived, and in what conditions; where they went to church and school; their occupations, and how much they had earned; what they might have eaten as a staple diet and if that might have had any effect on their cause of death, trying to avoid the same trap themselves. In fact, a much wider spread of interest than just the names of their great-great-grandparents.