Family Historian User Group

GRO have today announced that some British historic birth and death certificates are available, almost instantly as digital images for £2.50 as a jpeg.

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/cert ... search.asp

You need to login and select the digital images option. This is in addition to the pdf option.

I gather that it’s been in beta testing for quite a while, and went live today. The FAQ document appears to show a screen grab from 2021…

Very exciting indeed! Just glad I didn't order any over the last few weeks...

David2416 wrote: ↑

06 Jul 2023 14:49

GRO have today announced that some British historic birth and death certificates are available, almost instantly as digital images for £2.50 as a jpeg.

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/cert ... search.asp

You need to login and select the digital images option. This is in addition to the pdf option.

This is what you get for your £2.50.

That's pretty good, and £2.50 is good value I think.

I didn't know they were working on this. I do wish they would complete the work on digitizing the records that they ran out of money for a number of years ago.

LostCousins newsletter about this: https://lostcousins.com/newsletters2/jul23special.htm

There must be an increased demand, as site has slowed to a crawl this morning

As one of the original trial group, I've been using the digital image system since the first restricted testing - I think it was almost 2 years ago that we had the first meeting with GRO.

It works really well, but as noted the test data is limited as far as deaths is concerned, hopefully that may change in the future - the digitised data is available for that to happen.

The image you get is exactly the same as you would get on a certificate, or on a pdf (minus the headings), but the only issue that there has been is with image alignment....

Essentially, when a pdf is produced there is a human operator who calls up the digital image and then makes sure it is trimmed and aligned correctly before making it available to see - with the instant download option that human operator isn't there, so during the trial period I have found that quite a few images are slanted, or misaligned enough to make some of the information on the entry unreadable or missing entirely. This has been an issue in probably 5%-10% of the entries I have accessed.

But, when it has happened I have submitted a simple image quality report ( which we were strongly encouraged to do during the initial trial) and GRO have refunded the £2.50 charge within a couple of days.

The only real limitation, other than the years available, is that marginal notes, where there is one, are not shown and they can sometimes be very important to see..

I succumbed - one of my long-standing mysteries is a Frank Taylor who appears as an 8-year-old in the 1891 census. He's living in my GG-GM's household and is just described as her grandson. Similar in 1901 and 1911, just adding 10y each time. Unfortunately, he's b Newton Heath in the 1st census and Bury in the 2 later ones. So because there were 3 candidates, I was going to have to buy certificates to (hopefully) eliminate candidates.

There are a couple of points.

Because you don't get the Registration District and Sub-District at the top of the JPG images, if you want to cite the right source, you have to be careful when you download the image, to immediately mark it up in some way with things like the year and quarter, RD, volume, page, etc. I add those details into the image metadata but you could alter the downloaded filename, which doesn't seem meaningful. Downloading only one at a time would seem sensible to reduce confusion.

Whether you care about the Sub-District is up to you - I do because it's a bridge to the UK BMD sites - in fact, since they give the finer level of Sub-Districts, I'd previously done my initial filtering on LancashireBMD.

I also had to re-acquaint myself with the rules for unmarried mothers' maiden names (MMN). GRO contends that they have a blank MMN - I guess they were simply indexing the "formerly" name. LancashireBMD records their MMN as their current name.