wasted points

[Scozzie]

I just bought 60 credits at SP. I got two marriage certificates (after 1855). The rest of the points were wasted. Why can't SP let us enter the names of parents if we know them? It's very frustrating when you get a list of 5 pages with no idea which one may be yours. This isn't funny when you have names like Smith & Robertson.
Is it possible to buy shares in SP?

[DavidWW]

I just bought 60 credits at SP. I got two marriage certificates (after 1855). The rest of the points were wasted. Why can't SP let us enter the names of parents if we know them? It's very frustrating when you get a list of 5 pages with no idea which one may be yours. This isn't funny when you have names like Smith & Robertson.
Is it possible to buy shares in SP?

SP would love to be able to do just that, as well as the parents for a birth search, and the parents for a death search......... bit it's not a question of "won't", it's a question of "can't"

What you are searching on SP is not the full information on the register entries, but the indexes to those register entries that have been created annually since 1855. The information in the indexes is much less than is in the full register entries.

Of course it would be possible to add additional information to the indexes (and this did happen from 1928/29 for onwards births and 1974 onwards for deaths, when, in both cases the mother's maiden name was added to the indexes), but to go back now, and add additional information such as the parents' names to marriage register index entries from 1855 to 1929 would be a massive project as somewhere around 2,000,000 records are involved for that 76 year period.

And before anyone asks, yes, OCR software has been tried on the original registers, but found to be impractical given the handwriting often found and the condition of some of the older registers. Just see the number of posts on TS in terms of difficult to interpret register entries which often lead to debate among experts OK it's quite possible very often to determine the name or the place by looking at and researching in other records, but that's just not feasible if you are talking about even just 1% of 2,000,000 records .............. and I suspect that it could be a lot more than 1%.

The great majority of voluntary efforts in Scotland and amongst Scottish researchers all round the world is currently devoted to FHSs' own projects and the FreeCen project ............. Whether or not FreeCen will continue when 1841 amd 1851 are added to SP remains to be seen, as any decision of FreeCen not to continue could free up substantial resources around the world which could be applied to such a project, always assuming that GROS were prepared to make the info available.

For births, remember that you can search on the LDS FamilySearch.org site on the basis of the names of the parents for the period 1855 to 1875, +1881, and 1891.

David

[Scozzie]

Thanks David. I've looked for rellies on the LDS site, found a few, but most of mine aren't on there (maybe they were heathens?)