Thurso and area parish registers - free online website

[Pompeygirl]

Kristy's kindness in transcribing the long list of names from her wills made me wonder if newcomers like myself are aware of the unsung heroes who are transcribing parish registers. The Thurso area has excellent coverage for baptisms and marriages, and gives far more info than the IGI (familysearch). Quite often the transcriptions include occupations and witnesses. It's a searchable index, and it's FREE!!
Use the drop-down menu for Caithness county. if you leave the parish menu as "all", then you can pick up Thurso, Olrig, Dunnet etc. It's also worth using alternate spellings - eg Bain/Bane; Miller/Millar
http://www.freereg.org.uk/cgi/Search.pl

It's a really useful site to save money before going onto scotlandspeople.

There's also a reasonable coverage for Thurso and area in the equivalent census site
http://www.freecen.org.uk/cgi/search.pl

Good luck, and here's to the people who have given so much time and commitment!

[kristy_mac8]

Great idea, Pompeygirl.

I've only recently re-discovered this site myself a few weeks ago, because when looked last time, none of the areas I was interested in were covered. But now, as you said, there's excellent coverage for Thurso.

On the subject of free sites, there is another fantastic one called Archive.org (http://www.archive.org). It has a lot of old books and parish registers online that aren't copyrighted, or their copyright has expired (or something like that). While there aren't any parish registers that I noticed for Caithness, there are a heap for England for people researching there, and for other countries too (Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Shropshire have quite a lot of coverage, there are several others too). Just enter the search term 'parish register'.

Searching for Caithness will bring up a few things too. There are a couple dealing with family history, written by a Henderson, dealing with several families.

What I've found is easiest, is when you've found a book, click on the 'flip book' format, so you can view it on-site without waiting for a big download. If it's something you'd like, many can be downloaded in PDF format.

Kristy