What would help your research most?

Thanks to the efforts of Baroness Scott (see her newsletter article) the General Register Office will be forced to bring forward proposals for change in the way that information is provided from the historical birth, marriage, and death registers for England & Wales in their possession. I hope that they will consult with key people in the genealogy world before setting out the options for comment.

If we could use the experience, knowledge, and ingenuity of forum members we should be able to come up with better ideas than the GRO will on their own.

Inevitably most family historians are going to focus on the price charged for access to uncertificated copies of entries. But there's so much more that could be done to help family historians, by providing new and innovative methods of searching through the data.

Here's a few examples to give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm thinking about:

- searching the birth registers by address
- searching the marriage registers by the names of the witnesses
- searching the death registers by the name of the informant

Those of you who have experience of searching BMD records for other countries are in a particularly good position to make suggestions (but please bear in mind that the information on your certificates may be different).

Please start a new thread for each suggestion - they can always be combined later if that is thought to be helpful.