Newsletter – 12th
July 2023
GRO ONLINE VIEW
SPECIAL EDITION
Instant online access to historic birth & death
registrations
How your research
strategy might change, and how you might benefit
How to order an
image: a step by step guide
Last chance to save
on Ancestry DNA in the UK ENDS MONDAY
Exclusive WDYTYA
magazine offer ENDS SOON
Big savings on a wide
range of magazines ENDS TUESDAY
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Instant online access to historic birth & death
registrations
On
Thursday 6th July the General Register Office (GRO) launched their
new Online View service, which offers instant access to images of historic
entries from their birth and death registers for England & Wales.
The
service currently covers the following records:
- Births from 1837-1922
- Deaths from 1837-1887
The
GRO have stated that for reasons of privacy their policy is to restrict the new
service to births over 100 years old, so I anticipate that they will add 1923
births early next year, 1924 births the following year, and so on until 2035,
when births from 1934 are added. Birth registers after 1934 have not been
scanned.
To
the best of my knowledge there is no legal reason to restrict access to deaths
after 1887, and as the death registers have been scanned up to 1957 there could
be a considerable extension in due course.
Note:
the end date of 1887 has been unchanged since the beginning of the first trial
of this service, nearly two years ago, so I’m not expecting an extension in the near future.
How your research strategy might change, and how you
might benefit
When
getting hold of a copy of a birth or death entry means a wait of a week – and a
bill of £7 for a PDF (or £11 for a certificate) – it’s tempting to try and
figure out the answer by other means. Sometimes I would spend a couple of hours
trying to find the answer to a minor mystery in my tree, only to give up and
order a PDF. Other times I’d put it on the back burner, and hope something
turned up.
But
with instant access to historic birth and death register entries at the very
reasonable cost of £2.50 there was no reason, other than pride, to look for a
workaround. Not only was I able to answer questions more quickly, and with less
effort, I began making unexpected discoveries – sometimes it was the fact that
a birth had been registered precisely 42 days after it had occurred – which can
mean that the parent who registered it adjusted the date to avoid a penalty.
(No doubt this explains some of the discrepancies in the dates of birth shown
in the 1939 Register.)
Sometimes
it was the identity of the person who registered a death, or the cause of
death, or perhaps the length of time that the deceased had been ill: scraps of
additional information that add to our image of life for our ancestors 150
years ago. Other times it might be what the entry didn’t say – if a married
woman was described as ‘wife of’ rather than ‘widow of’ in a death register
entry it tells us that her husband was still alive, even if he wasn’t the one
who registered the death.
Occasionally
one discovery leads to another – the place of birth of a child, or a different
occupation shown for its father, might enable us to track down the family in a
census that was taken around the same time. In general, the more we look, the
more we’ll find – so having instant access to contemporary records of family
members opens provides us with many more opportunities to solve mysteries and
shed light on their lives.
Note:
I wonder who will be the first fictional genealogist to make use of the
new system?
In
July 2021 I reported
that I and a small number of others had been invited to attend a virtual
meeting with the GRO.
A
similar meeting 5 years earlier had led to the introduction of the PDF service,
which has subsequently proved so useful, especially for researchers overseas
who previously might have had to wait 2 or 3 months to receive a certificate
through the post – so I was hopeful that whatever the GRO were going to unveil
might have a similar impact.
However,
as I explained at the time, those of us who were invited to the meeting were
obliged to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement – a standard precaution that I was
perfectly happy to go along with (though had I known that I would have to stay
tight-lipped for almost 2 years I wouldn’t have been quite so happy!).
The
Online View trial went live on 16th September 2021: I ordered three
images the first day, another three the following day, and I’ve ordered about 70
others since. Previously I would have ordered no more than 3 to 4 PDFs or
certificates each year, so my expenditure has increased by a factor of 3 – but
I’ve gained 10 times as much information for my money, and more importantly I
haven’t had to wait for it.
Note:
although I wasn’t allowed to talk about the Online View service during the
trial, several of the images I purchased appeared in the newsletter. Nobody noticed
– and why would they – because PDFs and certificates are produced from the same
register entries. The main difference is that certificates are printed onto
standard forms, whilst PDFs have column headings pasted above the register
entry. When you view an image online there are headings shown, but when you
download the image there are no headings.
How to order an image: a step
by step guide
Start
by logging-in at the GRO website using this link –
you’ll need to register if you haven’t done so previously. After logging-in
you’ll see the Main Menu – don’t be confused by the range of different options,
because there’s only one that you’re likely to need, Search the GRO Indexes.
Tip:
the ONLY way you can order an Online Image is via the GRO’s own indexes – you
can’t find an index entry on another site and use that to place an order, as
you might with a certificate. So whether you want to
place an order, search the indexes, or both, you can use the same menu option.
There
are no marriage indexes on the GRO site (and no prospect of any in the
foreseeable future), so the choice is between births and deaths:
Let’s
suppose you’re searching for a birth – but the procedure is much the same
whichever option you choose:
Start
by choosing the year – if you’re not sure you can search up to 2 years on
either side. Bear in mind that births could be registered up to 6 weeks after
the date of birth, so a December (or late November) birth could well have been
registered in the following year.
Surname and Sex are
the only compulsory fields – don’t bother choosing anything other than Exact
matches only as the fuzzy matching is poor, and using
it will really slow the process down.
I’ve
chosen to enter the Forename in this example, and that is sufficient to
keep the number of results down, but if you were searching for a John Smith you might be forced to add extra information
since a maximum of 250 results will be returned. Entering the Mother’s
Maiden Surname (if you know it) is a good option.
Now
click Search to view the results:
Notice
there are two entries for the same birth, but with different volume numbers –
we’ll be discussing this a little later. But for now
let’s click the first entry to see what options are available:
In
this case I could order a certificate (£11), a PDF (£7), or a digital image
(£2.50). They’ll all show the same register entry – but with a few
embellishments if you pay more and are prepared to wait.
As
soon as you click one of those blue bars you’ll be taken to the next page,
which shows a summary of your order, and allows you to alter it should you
wish. But when you’re ordering a digital image there are no options, so I’m not
going to confuse matters by showing the order summary – just click Submit
near the bottom and you’ll see this:
If you’ve ordered PDFs in the past you’ll
know that they have no legal status, and digital images are the same – though
they’re both jolly useful for family historians like us (who needs a
certificate anyway – you’re only going to scan it and file it away).
Tick the box and click Submit – now you’ll see a summary of
your order. You can order more than one image at a time, but why would you – if
you’re like me you’ll want to see how this order pans out (and you’ve only got
a few more seconds to wait).
Click Continue to payment – and just to make absolutely sure you’ll see another summary of your order, ie:
As you can see, the GRO go to great lengths to ensure that
customers don’t submit the wrong order, but in practice there isn’t much that
can go wrong – other than picking the wrong entry from the index, which is
always a risk. But when there’s only £2.50 at stake it’s not so bad….
Click Confirm to proceed to the payment page – at long
last! If you haven’t ordered online from the GRO before I can tell you that
it’s very similar to the payment process at LostCousins, except that you’re
restricted to paying with Visa, Mastercard, or Maestro.
Once you’ve entered your credit card details you must click the
box to confirm that you’re not a robot, then click the blue tick to the right
of the words MAKE PAYMENT, not the words themselves. Since it’s
not particularly intuitive I’ve highlighted it with a red arrow in the
screenshot below:
Nearly there – just one more step:
At last – now you’re just seconds away
from seeing the image (the annotations in red in the screenshot below
are mine):
Excited?
You should be – just click View Image Online and here’s your image at long
last……
To
download the image to your computer click the fourth
button, the one with a downward facing arrow. If for any reason you need to
access the digital again, click My Orders in the menu at the right and
search for it by date or my order reference number (I always do it by date
because it’s easier).
Ignore
the despatch date shown – I’m writing this article on 11th July and
it’s telling me that the image I’ve already seen and downloaded won’t be
‘despatched’ until tomorrow!
And
don’t bother clicking View details – that’ll just show you a summary of
the order. What you actually need to click is E/W Birth
Digital Image (E/W stands for England & Wales).
The
whole process may seem rather tortuous, but that’s partly because they’re
allowing for the possibility that customers might order digital images, PDFs,
and certificates at the same time. Now you know what to do, next time you place
an order it’ll just be a series of clicks.
Note:
there is also a guide to ordering Digital Images on the Frequently Asked
Questions page at the GRO site, but it’s not as comprehensive.
The
birth and death register entries were scanned over 15 years ago as part of the
Digitisation of Vital Events (DoVE) project – which
was abandoned in 2008 because it was proving too costly. However
although the project wasn’t completed, the scanned images were used internally
by the GRO to produce certificates and, from 2016 onwards, PDFs.
Online
View is a fully automatic process, whereas producing certificates and PDFs
requires human intervention – that’s why Online View is so much cheaper. The
downside is that if the image isn’t perfect, there’s nobody who can put it
right.
The
most common problem is that the entry is trimmed at the top or the bottom, or
slightly angled – you may get to see a small part of the preceding entry, or
the one that follows, but there’s a little bit missing from the entry you paid
for. Often this isn’t a problem – you can figure out what it is supposed to
say. But if you can’t, as in the example below, contact the GRO and they will
probably issue a refund.
Note:
what they won’t do is provide you with a realigned image – if you want a
better copy then I’m afraid you’ll need to order a PDF (or a certificate). Put
it another way, if you want personal service you have
to pay for it!
Another
problem you might encounter is the omission of an entry from the indexes. I revealed
in 2019 that there were several large blocks of missing entries, and that some
other entries had been duplicated, either in the wrong quarter or with the wrong
volume number.
Note:
please don’t report missing or incorrect entries to me unless you
discover a large block of thousands of entries from the same volume which
hasn’t previously been found (see this article
for the latest find, and follow the link in the article for a list of other
missing or duplicated blocks).
There’s
an example of a duplicated entry in the previous article – here it is again:
I’ve
bought both of the images for Matilda Emily Wells and
they’re identical – almost all of the volume 4A entries for that quarter have
been duplicated as volume 3B, whilst all of the volume 3B entries for the
quarter are completely missing. Considering that the online birth and death
indexes were used internally by the GRO for years before they were published on
their website in November 2016, I don’t anticipate that the missing entries are
going to be added any time soon – if ever.
Note:
it’s possible that the scans for volume 3B for that quarter are missing, so
even if the index was updated you still might not be able to view the entries.
This
extract from the quarterly birth indexes for the third quarter of 1881 confirms
that 4A is the correct volume number:
The
handwritten, typed, or printed quarterly indexes were compiled by GRO staff
shortly after the end of each quarter, and they are the basis for the indexes
you will find at sites including Ancestry, Findmypast, and FreeBMD.
By contrast the indexes on the GRO site were compiled in the 21st
century working from the registers that had been scanned – which is how they
can include information that was not in the quarterly indexes.
Although
family historians have long called for online access to the historic registers
of births, marriages, and deaths in England & Wales held by the General
Register Office (GRO), it is only in the past decade that legislation has been
passed to authorise the use of modern technology.
Appropriately
it was on Christmas Day 2014 that I wrote
“Baroness Scott of Needham Market, a Liberal Democrat life peer, recently put
forward a proposal for electronic versions of birth, marriage and death
certificates - basically what we've been asking for all along” though at that
time there was no expectation that the Government would accept the amendment.
But
just two months later I delighted to report
that “the Government has accepted an amendment to the Deregulation Bill
currently going before the House of Lords that allows for the publication of
information from Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates in England and Wales to
be issued otherwise than in the form of a certified copy.”
In
2016 I was delighted to be invited by the GRO to a meeting at the Home Office
where they revealed their plans to trial a new service providing PDF copies of
entries – but though the question was asked, it was clear there was no firm
plan to provide a completely automatic online alternative.
But
on 7th October 2020 the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at
the Home Office signed Statutory Instrument 2020 No. 1093 (which you can find here).
This made possible the service that launched last week, though nobody seems to
have noticed it at the time – even I didn’t discover it until the spring of
last year.
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means you get better results for far less effort than at other sites).
Please
use the link below so that LostCousins can benefit from your purchase (note
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Tip:
be sure to follow the advice in my DNA
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hassle, but most importantly it will help you knock down your ‘brick walls’
more quickly and with far less effort.
Exclusive WDYTYA magazine offer ENDS SOON
It’s
not too late to take advantage of the exclusive offer I’ve arranged – but don’t
leave it too long, since the offer will end this month.
There's
an extra special introductory offer for members in the UK, but there are also
offers for overseas readers, each of which offers a substantial saving on the
cover price:
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Big savings on a wide range of magazines ENDS
TUESDAY
Until
next Tuesday (actually until 10am on Wednesday 19th July) you can
save on subscriptions to a wide range of magazines – in many cases UK readers
can get 6 issues for just £9.99, a fraction of the price you’d pay at the
newsagents, and in some cases you can get 6 issues for
just £6.
You
will be signing up for a rolling subscription, and the renewal will be at a
more normal price – so if you don’t want to continue make sure you cancel in
good time. I eventually had to cancel my Country Life subscription – not
because my wife and I didn’t enjoy the magazine, but because we simply didn’t
have time to read it!
Please
use this link,
or click the banner above so that you can support LostCousins with your
purchase.
A
lot of people have had their email accounts hacked at some time or other, and
once hackers get access to your address book they’ll
milk it for everything they can get.
The
email below is fairly typical – it discourages contact
by any method other than email, and simply asks for a ‘favor’
(in England we generally write ‘favour’, of course):
It
seems likely that the hacker no longer has control of Shirley’s website because
he has requested that replies are sent to a different address. I can see both
addresses with my email program, but it might not be so obvious to you.
If your email account has been hacked in the past, and the
contents of your address book have been stolen, you can’t get them back – but
what you can do is warn your friends and relatives that they might receive
emails asking for assistance of one kind or another. Sadly
some people do get fooled, and end up losing large sums of money.
Here’s another example, also received today – this time on my
mobile phone:
This couldn’t fool me because I’m not a ‘Mum’ – I’m not even a
‘Dad’ – but a lot of people are, and they could well get sucked in. This
opening gambit seems innocent enough, but it’s what comes afterwards that will
cost you money.
I’m lucky – very few people have my mobile phone number and it isn’t published anywhere (my wife gets many
more ‘smishing’ texts than I do). By contrast the LostCousins email address may
not be published on the website, but it’s in the address books of thousands of
members, so I get quite a few ‘phishing’ emails.
But you can be too cautious – I’ve known LostCousins members to
close their account because when they logged in they
got a message warning them that their password had been compromised. In fact,
what the message was telling them is that someone else used the same
password at a different site, one that had been hacked. No matter
how secure your password might seem, unless it has been generated randomly
there’s a good chance that someone, somewhere has had the same idea.
I use a different email address for every site I register at,
including LostCousins – that’s how I know which of the sites I have used have
been hacked and which ones haven’t. Not everyone can do that, of course – and
in any case it does have some disadvantages.
This is where any major updates and corrections will be
highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error first reload the newsletter
(press Ctrl-F5) then
check again before writing to me, in case someone else has beaten you to
it......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2023 Peter Calver
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