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Research Links
Websites you may find of use in researching your family history. If anyone has found an useful resource that can be added to this list please get in touch.

www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
Highly recommended. Use this site to download the official government record of your ancestor's birth, marriage or death. Years covered are Births from 1855-1905, marriages 1855-1930 and deaths 1855-1955. Each year, years are added to the database. There are also twenty-seven wills and testaments listed for Flotta on this site. Census images and Old Parish Records are scheduled to come online throughout 2005. You'll need to register and it costs a minimum of £6.00 to search and download records (except for wills and testaments which cost £5.00 each).

Archaic Medical Terms
An excellent dictionary of medical terms. Extremely useful for translating the cause of death on death certificates. New

www.familysearch.org
Website of the Latter Day Saints. Search for those early ancestors not yet covered by the General Register Office. They have have an index of Old Parish Records (known as IGI) covering Births and Marriages. Please note that their index can include transcribers errors and also have a varying coverage of places. I've noticed that generally the Flotta records are reasonably accurate and almost all the Old Parish Records for Flotta are listed. The LDS transcription of the 1881 British census is also available on their website (As is the US 1880 census and the Canadian 1881 census).

www.cursiter.com
Similar to the Latter Day Saints web site except Orkney births have been extracted from the LDS index and arranged into family names (Barnet, Isbister, etc) very useful to print out if you want to do a one name study and try and connect all the families with the same name together. Mr Cursiter also has a very good guest book in which many family history researchers list their interests.

Norquay
For those of you with the Norquay name in your tree, this website includes birth, marriage and census information, also features other miscellaneous data such as gravestone inscriptions, death dates, etc. New

www.orkneyfhs.co.uk
Website of the Orkney Family History Society. They are in the process of putting more and more of their resources online (membership required), they also have a set of excellent census transcriptions for Walls and Flotta for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901; which you can order by snail mail. They also have a contacts list of member's family names.

http://www.pro.gov.uk
If your ancestor served in the British army or the Royal Flying Corps during WW1 you can now download their medal index card from the Documents Online section of the Public Record Office website. Medal index cards include details of their rank, the units they may have served in and their medal entitlement. Also availiable on the site are the records of medals claimed by Merchant Seamen who served in WW2. Each record costs £3.50 to download.

www.ellisisland.org
Did your ancestor visit or emigrate to America? Ellis island holds the passenger arrival records of some emigrants entering the USA. Passenger lists vary as to the amount of information they will tell you but some of the later ones are very good indeed giving such things as age, distingishing features, occupation and reason for entering the country. There are some Flottarians listed but be warned, a few of the index listings have been filed with the wrong record image. None the less a very good site.

www.rootsweb.com
A very good site for getting in contact with other researchers. Visit the message board for Orkney or join the very good Orkney message list and get in contact with those relations.

www.genuki.com
Check out the Orkney page on this site. Gives an overview of resources available and a little info on each of the parishes.On their site they also have a list of those willing to share their research with others. There are at least two or three very generous researchers listed who are researching Flotta families.

www.orkneylibrary.org.uk
The website for the Orkney Library and Archive, in Kirkwall, gives you details of their services, and contact addresses and emails for the differant departments. Click on the archives button at the top of their webpage for information about the Orkney Archives.

....Apr 2005. Last updated Oct 2005