BAH! HUMBUG! It looks like that old tale of the Scots being tight-fisted might be true after all, because there were Scrooges alive and well here in days of old.

Genealogy website ScotlandsPeople discovered four people in its records with the surname made infamous by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol.

What old Ebenezer would have made of that is anyone’s guess—perhaps he would have been none too happy at the thought of finding relatives hoping for presents, or a loan.

But from his eagerness to keep his clerk Bob Cratchit’s nose to the grindstone, he would surely have appreciated the effort that has gone into amassing ScotlandsPeople’s wealth of records.

It now boasts 46 million entries in its database and it was while adding 100,000 more that the foursome named Scrooge turned up, dating from 1898.

The website was set up in 2002 as a partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) and information technology company Scotland Online.

It contains the most comprehensive online set of family history information for any country in the world and is one of the largest single information resources on the web.

Spokesman Dr Richard Callison said, “Every year we are able to add new data to ScotlandsPeople, which has grown in popularity at a phenomenal rate, and we fully expect this to continue as more and more people discover an interest in genealogy.”

The latest updates including records from the Statutory Register of Births for 1903, the Statutory Register of Marriages for 1930, and the Statutory Register of Deaths for 1955.

Also available are a wide variety of census data, old parish registers and wills and testaments.

Raymond Evans, internet and external services manager at GROS, said, “With over 20 million US citizens alone claiming Scottish ancestry it’s hardly surprising that the website has proved to be so popular.

“In ScotlandsPeople we have helped to create an extremely valuable resource and we will continue to develop it over the coming years.”

The website has been used extensively by both home-based and ex-patriate Scots from around the world who are seeking basic information on their background or carrying out in-depth research on their family tree. It has 320,000 registered users.

It can be found at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk