Access to England & Wales BMD Registers

There's also the question of charging for search results, as they do at ScotlandsPeople. The downside is having to pay -the upside is more complex searches and more informative results.

 

I mentioned that Peter in my Scotlands People section, its usually the difference between pay per view and subscription. Most pay per view sites either charge you for searching or tell you its found results and gives tantalising details but require payment for seeing the full results. Some are of course free to search but pay to see details of results.

Subscription sites are good where you can justify the full cost of the subscription, I've only 1 in 32 of my Ancestors from England so would struggle to justify a subscription just as many researching English ancestors with a couple of Scots would struggle to justify a subscription if one was offer by Scotlands People. So a pay per view is no necessarily a bad thing, however having the OPTION of a subscription would be very useful.

 

You would want to make absolutely sure they not only allow searching by County but across multiple counties. A really useful feature of a search would be being able to select a group of counties to search on eg: Devon/Cornwall (for ancestors who strayed over the Tamar into England). Hereford/Worcestershire/Glocestershire for instance.

Similarly being able to pick a group of parishes to search on would be useful. Scotland's People does this for example you can limit to the county then pick up to 5 parishes within a county. Note English parishes tend to be smaller than Scottish ones so you might want to be able to pick more than 5.

Ideally you'd want to pick an area on a map and have the search limited to the parishes within a rectangle you draw on the map. This is far more interactive but really useful.

Similarly viewing results on a map would be entirely feasible and is common on many sites these days. eg: I was just looking at booking a hotel for a week away and the site allowed searching by map and viewing the results on a map. My key point is here, that the raw data will contain the parish, registration district, county info. It is therefore trivial for the extra step to show these on a map to be implemented.

Imagine searching for person X's birth in Hereford/Worcestershire/Glocestershire and getting back a map showing the parishes highlighted where a birth existed for those search criteria. So much more informative than just a list.

 

It's very unlikely that we'll be able to buy a subscription offering unlimited use. Wonderful if we could, but it would be a big gamble for the government. It's only likely to happen if the service is contracted out to a company like Ancestry or Findmypast which is prepared to guarantee a minimum return to the government.

That's why we need to consider carefully the pros and cons - for us - of paid search results. Most people would instinctively say that they don't want to pay for search results but I think we need to consider how it might work in our favour.

 

What you mean by registration/reference number?

 

Given we've just had the first majority Conservative government for 23 years returned I think it is inconceivable that they would sanction anything other than contracting out the service. Even the left leaning Scottish Governments over the years have contracted out the Scotland's People service. To be honest though given the lack of controls common with Government IT projects this is probably a really good thing.

If we take contracting out as a given then we should look at what checks and balances ought to be recommended. eg: available from multiple sources? Is it conceivable that they might want to retain control over the database but put out to tender the provision of the data services?

 

Also worth considering is the issue of data protection. What levels of information should be revealed? The indexes currently give info up to almost modern day if memory serves. In Scotland there is a rule whereby images of births are restricted to 100 years closure, images of marriages restricted to 75 year closure and images of death restricted to 50 years closure. You can still search and view indexes for up to date records but you can't see the images for "closed" periods.

These limits seem an appropriate model to follow and would likely address privacy concerns. I'd be careful to ensure that recommendations didn't then remove information that is currently available. ie: indexes shouldn't then be closed for these periods thus losing existing info.

 

And would need to be true when English & Welsh records are all scanned.

 

In Scotland records are available with new images released at New Year rather than every day. This does cause a glut of searches at New Year rather than a steady flow which evens out demand and seems like a technically more logical way that would put less stress on the servers. I'd imagine this would be a point worth putting as an annual release of English records would cause huge spikes in demand. So NZ has a far better practice here that would be worth suggesting.

The point about index info was one I was concerned about, ie: that existing publicly records shouldn't then get hidden by a change in rules for images.

 

That's not the sort of arrangement I was thinking of. Although ScotlandsPeople has since it's inception been operated by Scotland Online, later known as BrightSolid, and now as DC Thomson Family History, the Scottish government sets the charges and determines the charging structure - as I understand it the contractors are merely providing IT services.

What I was envisaging was a situation where Findmypast and Ancestry would be invited to bid for the exclusive rights to sell the historical GRO data, and would be expected to guarantee a minimum level of income for the GRO. For either company it would be a sure fire way of attracting more subscribers.

 

We already have the indexes, and that's how we generally place orders at the moment.

There are several numbers on copy certificates but they are largely irrelevant: one is the Application number, one is a serial number for security purposes - neither of these are of any interest since they don't come the original records. The only reference that is recorded in the register is the number shown in the first column, which is the sequential number within the register. Since the numbers start at 1 in each new register I don't think they are likely to help in a search.