How to Trace Your Family Tree without Spending the Family Fortune

Esther Rantzen has written an article that will be of interest to anyone researching ancestors in England or Wales. She describes the services of the General Register Office that is now available online on Directgov. Some commercial companies charge as much as GBP30.00 for a birth certificate but each certificate costs from just GBP7.00 if you order online via Directgov.

Public information about registering births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales has moved from the GRO (General Register Office) website and is now available on the government's supersite, Directgov, from 7 April 2009.

One statistic in this article that amazed me was "GRO online ordering service currently receives up to 7,000 applications a day." No wonder they are moving their services to the web. Can you imagine the manpower required to handle 7,000 applications per day?

You can read more on the TMCnet web site at http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/04/07/4113281.htm.

Comments

[Caroline Gurney]

This is not news. Genealogists have been able to order certificates online at the GRO website for years.

[bobby]

Documents should be available instantly, after payment - online, and not via post. I would prefer to get mine that way.

[Peter Calver]

The big news will be when the data itelf goes online.

Historic BMD registers for Scotland have been online for years, and whilst the GRO have a project to make the England & Wales information available online, the last I heard it was on hold.

Maybe they should get one of the big genealogy companies to do it for them? Findmypast.com have done a good job with the 1911 Census, especially considering that a 3 year project had to be completed in 18 months after the Freedom of Information Act decision - so perhaps the GRO should give them a call?

Or are those 7,000 certificates a day at GBP7 each so lucrative that isn't in the GRO's interests to make any changes?

[Adrian B]

"This is not news". Well, yes and no. Clearly it is news to the people still paying 30 quid a go. Also - I'm not quite sure if the online GRO service has always been fully open to orders from outside the UK. As might be guessed from the fact that I said "30 quid" not "30 GBP", I'm not likely to be an expert in ordering from outside the UK so would welcome any clarification.
What few people have picked up on is that while lots of publicity was given to the services now being accessible from Directgov, in fact you end up on exactly the same web-page, which is still accessible from the old link in my bookmarks. In other words, somebody will no doubt claim a massive success for altering nothing at the sharp end!
Still - publicity for the 7GBP option is all to the good.

[jacqui]

The £7 is conditional on you knowing the index ref nos if you want them to search for you it costs more. You can also use them to just do a search where you are doubtful whether you have the right one by using their reference checking service. If it isn't the right one they only charge you for the search not the full amount. It usually takes about a week for the cert to come although just after "Who Do You Think You Are" was first aired a few years ago there was a huge backlog and about a 3 week wait. (If you ring them up instead it will cost £8.50 per cert if you know the ref nos.) The fast service costs a lot more and takes about 2 days for the UK.

But yes this is not news well not to us in the UK anyway - and I think it is more likely they have moved it as they are now part of the Home Office Identity and Passport Service and it may have got clogged up.????? or they don't want it to seem as if they are checking up on us I notice they no longer have the announcement about death registrations being released to financial institutions to help prevent fraud LOL

I have not noticed any difference in the service times everything else seems the same only the webhosting is different.

For Northern Ireland certificates you can also order online at

http://www.groni.gov.uk/index/order_certificates.htm

but for Eire
http://www.groireland.ie/about_us.htm

it is not possible yet to order online although you can download a form and post it back with your credit card details. (Took about three weeks to get photocopies of register entries back at 6 Euros each)

[Chris Pomery]

Hi Dick,

As Caroline says, online ordering of UK BMD certificates has been possible for some years. You can do it at .

What's new is that the main UK government portal now has several pages of resources that are helpful for certificate applicants, for example a list of "abolished districts" which no longer exist.

I think we've been sold some "news" which isn't quite what it seems!

[Nancy]

It may not be news to us oldtimers, but there are new genealogists emerging every day. Learning this piece of *not news* may be really exciting for a newbie - or may jog the memory of a more experienced researcher who had forgotten it. Every little bit helps!

[Carol Brassfield]

Re comment by Bobby who'd like certificates direct via internet. The £7.00 certificate by post is a certified copy. You wouldn't get the certification if you are left to print it out yourself.

[Dae Powell]

The £7.00 certificate is a bargain compared to the $27.00(US) for a Birth Certificate from California. Three weeks by post isn't too bad when compared to the 6 months delay from the Golden State. The California statistics are from my experience ordering my own record.

Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Alice]

I have ordered copies directly by internet and received them in the USA. I found my necessary information on FreeBMD.
Alice

[Terrence Flanagan]

Yes, it would be nice if the GRO gave the option of receiving your certificate online or through the mail. I don't need certified certificates for my genealogy hobby, I just want the information. And I would have to believe there would be a quantum leap in the amount of certificates ordered, if the price were halved for online delivery. Scotlands People certainly have the correct sales approach.

Terrence Flanagan