National Archives of Scotland
When war broke out between Scotland and England in 1296 and Edward I invaded, he had all the symbols of Scots nationhood—the regalia, the national archives and the Stone of Destiny—removed to London.
During the reign of Robert I, 'the Bruce' (1306–1329), and with the more settled nature of the country after the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the national archives grew in quantity.
When that too fell to the English in August 1651, some of the records were carried off by the garrison, some were rescued by the clerks, but most were sent away to London.
One of the two ships carrying the archives, the 'Elizabeth', sank in a storm off the Northumbrian coast with the loss of all the papers and parchments on board.
The move was partly designed to promote access to the records, but the accommodation was far from satisfactory and the archives were damaged by damp and vermin.
The great fire of 1700, which threatened the Parliament House, forced a temporary removal of the records to St Giles' church for safety.
By the mid-eighteenth century the need to provide accommodation for the national archives was widely recognised.
The eminent architect Robert Adam and his brother James were selected for the project in 1772 and the foundation stone was laid in 1774, by which time the original plans had been modified.
Construction resumed in 1785 and General Register House was completed to Robert Adam's modified design in 1788.
Robert Reid, also architect of St George's Church (now West Register House) and the facade of Parliament House, finished the exterior to a simplified version of Robert Adam's original design and the interior to his own design in the 1820s.
General Register House is one of the oldest custom built archive buildings still in continuous use in the world.
The appointment of Thomas Thomson to the post laid the foundation of the modern record office.
The growth in the office's activities and holdings brought a need for more accommodation and improved facilities.
The exterior was left unaltered but the entire interior was removed and replaced by five floors of reinforced concrete for offices and record storage.
In 1994 Thomas Thomson House was built at Sighthill Industrial Estate in the west of Edinburgh and opened the following year by the Princess Royal.
In the late 1990s the NAS became a pioneer in the digitisation and provision of online access to historical records on a very large scale, under the auspices of the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) project, whose partners were the National Archives of Scotland (NAS), the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), and the Genealogical Society of Utah (now Family Search).
The SCAN project created a single electronic catalogue to the holdings of more than 50 Scottish archives [10] and set up a copying programme, using high quality single-capture digital cameras.
The church court records extend to some five million pages of information and the NAS is, at the time of writing (2008), developing an online access system for large-scale, unindexed historical sources, in parallel to free access in the NAS's public search rooms, known as "virtual volumes".
