Thank you Russell for your comments on this page

Our Father James Drysdale.

The documents you refer to came from the vast repository of unindexed images in the Familysearch vaults, similar repositories of unindexed images are held by Scotlandspeople and many other state and commercial organisations.

What other unindexed genealogical gems (hand written and print) still remain undiscovered in these places?

Some opinions:

During the past 20 years or so, we armchair genealogists have been given ever-increasing access to information about our ancestors, in fact we've never had it so good:
- mass digitisation and indexing of old books, old records & media - with free or paid access via places like Internet Archive, Google books, National Archives, Ancesty, Findmypast etc.
- internet tools, email etc & search engines like Google
- word searches within digitised publications (eg pdf) - word & wild card search on some websites

However, some obscure publications and hand written documents and the information they contained were, by their very nature, unsearchable in many databases. Hence manually scanning through hundreds of document images and trying with difficulty to read reams of old hand-written text has been the norm for me for some records of late (try looking for a name in the virtual volumes (Kirk sessions etc) on the ScotlandsPeople website).

It's surprising that genealogists in the past were able to make so much progress and produce such good accurate work without the help of these digital tools!

Recent developments & future prospects

The recent introduction of the 'full text' search option on the Familysearch website (AI powered) allows full access to their unindexed image database with full typewritten and handwritten text search.

Other websites with digitised record databases will surely follow suit, I did contact Scotlandspeople about the possibility of them introducing AI word searches for their records, but they advised they had no current plans to introduce this.

Just imagine how many unknown people (our scottish forefathers) will be revealed when they finally do this ~ a typical baptism often has 2 or 3 named witnesses (names unindexed) while a Will often gives names of up to 20 people other than the the deceased - relatives, debtors, friends, officials etc.
Also their unindexed 'Virtual Volumes' of Kirk Session records is a very large image database resource that is largely untapped.

In my view a lot of previously unknown or lost ancestors are going to come to the surface within the next few years.

Best regards