Scotland’s
People CENTRE
Edinburgh’s General Register House, the
magnificent Robert Adam designed repository
for the national archives of Scotland, is
now the hub of a unique new family history
resource offering a one stop shop for all those
seeking details of their Scottish ancestry. The
£7.5 million ‘ScotlandsPeople Centre’ houses
the digitised records of the General Register
Office for Scotland, the Court of the Lord Lyon
and the National Archives of Scotland and
promises to provide a wider range of computer-
based archival material than is available in
any other country in the world. In Edinburgh,
Catriona Stuart spoke with George MacKenzie,
Keeper of the Records of Scotland.
f the shade of Scotland’s greatest architect, Robert
I
Adam, could somehow return to Edinburgh
and enter once again the overarching splendour
of his vast glass-topped dome at Register House,
I suspect he’d be more than a trifle astonished and
probably rather pleased that the building his genius
created in the late eighteenth century remains a hive
of human activity. When Adam last came here for the
building’s official opening in 1788 he no doubt had
the satisfaction of seeing a phalanx of wigged and
gowned lawyers and their diligent clerks poring over
bundles of red-taped documents, for this was then
the very heart of Scotland’s legal system, the place
where the all-important records and case histories
were carefully filed away for judicial reference.
Today, instead of the scratch, scratch, scratching of
goose quill pens on parchment, there’s the muffled
clackety-clack of computer keyboards as men and
women from the four corners of the world set out
in search of their Scottish ancestors. This is now the
hub of the ScotlandsPeople Centre, the world’s most
sophisticated genealogy research facility. It’s hard
to conceive of a more congenial place in which to
pursue the past.
The Scottish government has just spent £15 million
on the meticulous restoration and refurbishment of
both the Georgian General Register House and the
adjoining Victorian era New Register House at the
eastern end of Princes Street, a process that includes
spending £7.4 million on the new ScotlandsPeople
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