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Digitisation
Wills and testaments

Wills and testaments Since 1999 the National Archives of Scotland (NAS), in conjunction with FamilySearch (formerly the Genealogical Society of Utah), has been digitising Scottish historical records on a huge scale, in order to preserve the original records and to make digital surrogates more widely available. Between 2000 and 2004 the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) project, set up by the NAS and the Genealogical Society of Utah, digitised all 520,000 surviving wills and testaments registered in Scottish commissary courts and sheriff courts from 1500 to 1901: in total more than 2 million images. These have been linked to a single index compiled by SCAN using earlier incomplete indexes and partly from scratch.   The index can be searched for free and the images viewed for free at the National Archives of Scotland’s search rooms in Edinburgh. In addition the index can be searched for free online on the ScotlandsPeople website at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, where copy images can also be purchased.