GRO (England & Wales) Digital Images

[AntonyM]

I understand that GRO have finally made their (not so) "secret" instant digital download system available to the public, although still officially as a beta test system

This covers births from 1837, up to 100 years ago, and deaths from 1837 to 1887, which can now be instantly obtained at a cost of £2.50 per record.

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 soon.

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 during the trial so far has been 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 other 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..


More info here...

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/cert ... icBeta.pdf

[AdrianBruce]

Thanks for the heads-up - and warnings...

[Thunder]

This is useful, however we can't see deaths after 1887 (in Scotland it is currently 1972) and there are no marriages at all. The fact that the GRO are not going to have any more images is disappointing, to say the least.

[Mick Loney]

There must be lots of interest, as the site is virtually at a standstill this morning

[meekhcs]

Anything that reduces costs for Family Historians must be a good thing, even if dates are limited.

[paulr1949]

I can see me having to raid the piggy bank so perhaps it’s a goof thing the dates are currently restricted. I agree that marriages would be very useful.

[AdrianBruce]

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.

[AntonyM]

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.

GRO are correct - for all registration purposes a maiden name is the name in which a woman "first contracts a marriage", usually, but not always, their name at birth.

So an unmarried woman doesn't have one, hence the "dash" in the on-line GRO indexes.

[AdrianBruce]

...
GRO are correct - for all registration purposes a maiden name is the name in which a woman "first contracts a marriage", usually, but not always, their name at birth.

So an unmarried woman doesn't have one, hence the "dash" in the on-line GRO indexes.

Thanks for the succinct definition, Antony. I couldn't remember the phrasing that had been used.

I think that the learning point to take away is that, for whatever sensible reason, the GRO index and the LancashireBMD index (at least) do differ in the contents of that MMN data item.

[AntonyM]

The digital download option has now been extended to cover deaths up to 1957