Last Chance to Sign up for the "British Isles Research From Afar" workshop

You're running out of time: Our British Isles Workshop is this coming Saturday! Sign up by the 25th and you will get your lunch included! Join us at Faith United Church in Courtice, just east of Oshawa. We start with coffee and check-in at 9 a.m. and our Opening Remarks will be at 9:30 a.m.

We have 2 great speakers for you: 

Ruth Blair of Oakville and Stephen Wood of Whitby

We have 4 great talks for you:

Researching Your English and Welsh Ancestors

Taking Your Irish Ancestors Back Over The Pond

Particulars and Peculiarities of Scottish Research

Researching Your Scots-Irish Ancestors: Canada and Beyond

Register Now at the Durham Region Branch Workshop Page

or send us an e-mail to durhamevents@ogs.on.ca

ScotlandsPeople Credits

With special thanks to both the Scottish Special Interest Group & the Quinte Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society, whose e-mails pointed me to the following post at ScotlandNow:

SCOTLAND NOW, the website for Scots everywhere, has teamed up with ScotlandsPeople to give you the chance to help you trace your Scottish ancestry for free.

With this great offer you will receive 20 Free credits worth £4.50. It costs five credits to view an image, and one credit to view a page of search results so there will be plenty to search this offer.

With images of over 100 million indexed births, marriages, deaths, censuses, wills and other documents, including records of some of Scotland’s most famous figures such as Rob Roy, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk contains the most comprehensive official online set of family history information for any country in the world. As one of the largest single information resources online, ScotlandsPeople provides an easily accessible route to the unrivalled store of official Scottish records.

The ScotlandsPeople website is a partnership between the National Records of Scotland, a non-ministerial department of the Scottish Government, and the Lyon Office, enabled by Findmypast.

How to redeem the offer.

Register at www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk if you are new user, or log in using your username and password if you already have an account.

• New users will be required to complete a registration form.

• Once logged in, click on Buy more credits on the top right hand side of the page.

• You will be taken to a page where you should enter the promotion code. The promotional code is: scotlandnow. You will then be allocated 20 FREE credits worth £4.50

• It costs five credits to view an image, and one credit to view a page of search results.

• Your 20 FREE credits voucher must be redeemed by April 30, 2015. Your 20 FREE credits will then be valid for one year after you redeem the voucher.

For further help with redeeming a voucher code, please see the Voucher Help page.

Terms and conditions.

You must register at scotlandspeople.gov.uk in order to take up the offer and in so doing you agree to the terms and conditions of use for the ScotlandsPeople website. The free credit offer is restricted to one offer per individual. The offer codes must be validated at scotlandspeople.gov.uk before or on April 30, 2015. Your free credits will be added to your account, which will expire after one year or when they have been used up, whichever is the sooner. Credits are required to view the indexes and images on the website. The cost of viewing each different type of record can vary.

ScotlandsPeople to Restore Expired Credits

Did you have leftover credits on Scotlands People? And, did they expire before you were able to use them all up? Well, good news! See the announcement from Scotlands People below:

Reactivate your expired credits!
We are pleased to announce that for one week only, you can reactivate any expired ScotlandsPeople credits at no cost. The validity period at purchase is 365 days, so any credits purchased over a year ago can now be reactivated by entering the special promotional code spring2014. 

To reactivate your expired credits, please enter spring2014 into the 'voucher code' box on the Shopping Basket page. Pleaseclick here for a step-by-step guide to reactivating your expired credits. This promotional code will be valid up until midnight (BST) on 30/4/2014.