English and Welsh BMD deregulation bill only deals with GRO

It would seem that the deregulation bill recently passed to facilitate the eventual digitisation and upload of English and Welsh birth, marriage and death certificates (see http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/progress-towards-making-englishwelsh.html) will only apply to the records of the General Register Office at Southport, and not those from local registration offices in both countries (mirroring what has already happened in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Locally sourced certificates, however, whilst being a tad more expensive, can sometimes contain additional information not available in the GRO equivalents, which are derivative copies from the originals, and which can occasionally contain transcription errors or omissions.

Ian Hartas of the UKBMD project (www.ukbmd.org.uk) attended a meeting on Friday 18th December to hear about the plans, and has written up an account which can be read on Tony Proctor's Google + account at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TonyProctor/posts/EfbLTzwEuJL. In this he outlines concerns that the availability of cheap GRO images could provide financial pressures on local registration services struggling to compete.

(With thanks to Ian and Tony)

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including my recently released Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html. My Pinterest account is at https://www.pinterest.com/chrismpaton/.