Access to England & Wales BMD Registers

DVLA again - driving license renewal is now cheaper, in part because the paper counterpart has been dropped and an online self-service verification system introduced. That should be a good precedent for the GRO, I think.

 

Hi, I'm new around here, despite having been a Lost Cousins member since 2006. There's been a lot of discussion about the merits of Australian certificates, but I don't see how that addresses this specific issue. Surely we need to keep our focus on what is actually contained on English /Welsh certificates rather than what we wish was there!

My two penn'orth goes like this:

If there's no reindexing, then the only improvement we can hope for is a better delivery system (eg digital downloads) at a lower cost than at present.

A minimal reindexing might bring the earlier indexes up to the same standard as later ones (where possible). In particular, the age on death certificates and the mother's maiden name on birth certificates.

A more comprehensive exercise would add the name and status of the informant (on birth and death certificates) and the names of witnesses on marriage certificates.

Anything more and I would think I'd gone to heaven!

 

I know I’m late joining in on this, no other excuse other than I’ve been sitting back and waiting to see what evolved.

I am inclined to agree and I’m finding much of the input in this forum is off the track because we don’t need to know what other countries certificates contain, or how their systems work.

Realistically we are stuck with what the GRO UK records contain and what their database is capable of.

We have been asked for input in respect of the GRO UK, we should examine what is currently available and how we can gain access to their records.

Unless all the registers are digitised we have no hope of accessing anything more than the quarterly/annual lists of registrations that are available to view from many genealogy sites.

However, the GRO can locate a certificate for you if you are unable to provide the GRO index reference number. Perhaps we should find out how they do that? Assessing their method of searching would enable us to decide whether we could use it or if it needs improving and put forward any suggestions on that basis.

This is what the website says:
If you do not have the GRO index reference you may still apply online for any event which took place on or after 1st July 1837 to 6 months from the current date (for marriages this period is extended to 18 months) provided you have sufficient information to identify the entry. A 3 year search for the index reference will be carried out. You should supply the exact date of event if you have it. If you don't have the exact date, enter 01/01/YYYY and we will search the specified year and one year either side. If you do not provide an index reference number, your application will take up to 15 working days to process. There is a separate policy for events which have taken place in the last 50 years and full identifying information must be provided.

I don’t think we should be attempting to tell the GRO how much to charge, we simply need to let them know that we are prepared to pay a reasonable price and be given a choice of how to pay. Choices could be any or all of; on a pay per view, a month sub, three months sub, six months sub or an annual sub.

Take-up, among other things, would probably be taken into account by the GRO when setting the cost but how can the take-up be assessed? Will every researcher/genealogist want to regularly use the facility or only use it as a last resort?

In view of the letter from the GRO that states they are analysing options for implementation, it seems we have plenty of time to create meaningful discussion in this forum but I feel it should be all in one thread so we don’t lose sight of who said what.

Personally I would be quite happy to be able to use any existing searching facility to find the GRO reference number then be presented with a link to the actual registrars entry or a copy certificate and take a screen shot for my records instead of applying for a certificate.

 

I am sure that all forum members are very appreciative of receiving your views on this matter but are they really very different from their earlier comments? I certainly did not read them to mean something very different and hope that any perceived differences are only minor and can be attributed to the desire for brevity within individual posts.

The statements of what can be done in other countries and what their certificates contain should not be taken as telling the GRO what it should do. It is merely a sign of exasperation along the lines of 'if they can do that then why can't we?'.

Agreed, we cannot expect data to be added which does not already exist but perhaps more information which is already recorded could be indexed to allow searches on that data. Of course, that is not really a matter for the GRO but more for the likes of Ancestry and FMP, etc. From my experience of creating and using databses, the provision of an additional index is a fairly trivial matter. Including that in to the existing search routines would probably require a bigger effort.

Agreed and perhaps one of the moderators will be kind enough to move these comments to the original thread/discussion.

Again, I think your views are really very similar to those put forward by others. The cost of obtaining official certificates is higher than many can afford and in most cases it is not the actual certificate that is desired, just the information that would be included. If we can suggest what the GRO might do without incurring a lot of extra effort/cost then we might hope that such information may become available more affordably.

 

IF the earlier sentence had been noted . . .

I was thinking in terms of what could be achieved with minimal effort and was refering to a database index rather than a genealogical index. Witnesses are not currently recorded and obtained from the database so that would require considerable effort to make that data available. However, there are other fields which appear in the results but which cannot be searched on due to lack of a suitable databse index, eg names of parents in some cases. Anything that might reduce the number of possible records returned from a search and hence need to be examined.

There might also be a problem in trying to guess the probable contents of such fields before the search is performed. Names and dates are normally in a fairly standard format but there can be much more variation for places and occupations, etc. Even if witness data were to be recorded, it would still be difficult to guess who witnesses might be in order to perform a search on their names.