Latest Events
Investigative Genetic Genealogy – What is it and How can you help – Marie Palmer
Description Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) offers an exciting new opportunity to help Law Enforcement give names back to unidentified human remains and help solve criminal cases. Since the first high-profile case was solved in 2018, well over a thousand cases have been cracked using IGG. Canada has its own share of successful case solves and […]
Pollock, Gilmour & Co – Graeme Boyle
Pollock, Gilmour & Co In Andrew Gibb’s book – Glasgow, The Making of a City – he mentions how after the American War of Independence had interrupted tobacco supplies to Scotland …’individual firms, specialising in exotic products, grew to huge enterprises, such as Pollock, Gilmour and Company, by 1840 the largest timber importing business in […]
Sighthill Cemetery – Gary Nisbet
Gary’s talk about Sighthill will be an overview of the history of the cemetery, illustrating its great beauty and sculptural treasures, as well as highlighting the stories of some of the well-known and little-known people buried there. Gary Nisbet was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has been a freelance researcher and photographer specialising in […]
New to Scottish Genealogy?
Finding the Records
Explore Scotland’s fantastic public records, online and at your local library or family history centre, discover lesser known sources like ScotlandsPlaces and Farm Horse Tax Rolls, and choose the best software for you
Taking it Further
Give your family history a sense of place with old maps and photos, find distant cousins using DNA and take the road less travelled through unindexed archives and family papers at the National Records of Scotland
Member Resources
Research Centre
The Centre is home to books, maps, CDs, fiches, and publications from other societies. It offers free access to family history websites, and expert volunteers are on hand to help using the equipment and the resources
Data Sets
The Society is gradually digitising its unique data sets and will publish them on this website when they are ready. Members will be able to search these records which include MIs, parish registers, private family trees
Library
The Library holds approximately 4,000 publications relevant to Scottish genealogy searchable through the index, and also a unique collection of unpublished or privately published family histories and charts
Searching for Records
The Society has a sophisticated search engine uniquely tailored for family history research.
Records from the West of Scotland are tagged by traditional county and parish or city; in the rest of Scotland by county, and in the rest of the world according to Scottish relevance.
Surname searches can include an option for associated surnames and records can also be searched by date range or by exact date.
Click on a county name on the map….
Our History
Emma Maxwell, genealogist at Scottish Indexes, interviews the late Sheila Duffy from the Glasgow and West of Scotland Family History Society. During the interview, Sheila tells the story of seeing the Glasgow Poor Law Applications for the first time. This interview was from the 8th Scottish Indexes Conference in January 2021.
Courtesy of Scottish Indexes.
Alistair Smith
For twenty-five years we enjoyed the dedication of our late webmaster who single handedly created and maintained the website we loved and depended on for all that time.
We hope the new website lives up to his standards and your expectations. If you find anything that doesn’t, please contact us
Queries
The Society runs a closed Group on Facebook for people to post their queries to more than 5,000 fellow researchers