Helping Beginners in Family History

Normally I only answer questions where someone has come up across a brick wall, or raises an issue which is of wider interest. What I don't have time to do is to carry out extensive research for free when the information is readily available online and the questioner could easily find the answers themselves. However I occasionally get well written requests for help from someone who is just starting out and, if they are to be successful in the long term they need the experience and practice to find the "easy stuff" for themselves.

See Hollingsworth/Baker Marriage in 1922 at Puckeridge for the kind of reply I like to give to a beginner who starts by sending some old family certificates. [But remember I only answer questions relating to Hertfordshire prior to about the end of the First World War.]

Why not help others with their Family History Research

Most of you will probably know and use FreeBMD because of its excellent coverage of the Birth, Marriage and Death register indexes - which have been constructed by socially aware family historians who wanted to help others. Coverage is almost complete from 1837 to 1960. In May 2013 it contained 229,076,495 distinct records, and on one day in June was searched 145,484 times. Volunteers are still needed to help complete the work.

FreeCEN

FreeReg

FreeCEN aims to provide a similar service for the census, and FreeReg for the parish and non-conformist registers. However in both cases the coverage of Hertfordshire is small and volunteers are needed. 

So if you are retired and want to do something useful helping others why not volunteer today.

We want to register our children's births (1829)

When we are researching our ancestors we can come up against a problem for children born to non-conformist parents before July 1837. At least some of the people affected were very much concerned at the time and news item Registration of the Children of Dissenters from 1829 shows that some were writing to their Member of Parliament urging that something should be done about it.

A Non-conformist Birth Certificate.

So if you are struggling to get back beyond the 1837 "barrier" this news item will help you to understand how the problem was seen at the time.
But there some deeper questions. Why was a petition from a small chapel in Aylesbury given such prominence in a London daily such as The Times. One of the factors was the importance of politics - but it might also be that one of the people who attended the meeting in the chapel was John Gibbs, who may have been the Aylesbury correspondent for the paper, and also a strong supporter of Lord Nugent, the local M.P.. See the full account for more details, which also gives an example of a non-conformist birth certificate from Dr William's Library.

Advertisting Standards Agency stamps down on bogus "official" web sites

The Society of Genealogists have just posted the following message:

GRO Certificates News – clampdown on unofficial certificates sites and new telephone order number

And about time too. Of course if you are a regular here you will know that you can order certificates online at the GRO web site at the minimum price - See Would you pay £74.99 for a Birth Certificate?

Would you pay £74.99 for a Birth Certificate?

Well some people do - at least for the "express" delivery if they want a replacement birth certificate - and as the "we look official but we really are a scam" web sites often appear at the top online searches perhaps some genealogists have been caught out as well. I have just discovered a Home Office press release which points out that you can get the official express service for £23.40 and the standard cost of a certificate is £9.25.  

(Of course some genealogists are happy to pay over £12 extra to subsidize web sites such as Ancestry ...)

Why are Birth, Marriage and Death certificates so expensive.

If you buy a UK birth, marriage or death certificate directly from the government the current cost is £9.25 and this can be done online. However there are many genealogy and other sites which will place your order for you in return for a high premium! Such sites are often quite secretive about how much they charge until you have typed in your order - although I must praise official-certificates,co.uk as it is easy to find out that they charge £16.95.  (The basic rule is that if the URL does not end in .gov.uk you are almost certainly being charged well over the basic price for a certificate.)

But £9.25 is still very high and the reason is that the government will only provide certified copies - which are official legal copies of the type you need if, for example, you are applying for a passport, or if you are trying to prove that you are the heir to an unclaimed estate. The fact that your great great great grandfather is not eligible (for reason of death) to be able to apply for a passport makes no difference  - the govermnet will not supply a simple photocopy of the original register entry - it has to be certified ...

At the moment there are two e-petitions asking for the law to be changed so that genealogists can get simple copies at a lower price, rather than certified copies. If either of these petitions gets 100,000 signatures the government has to take notice - which unfortunately doesn't mean they have to change the law. 

If you would like certificates to become cheaper sign both the following petitions:

Research Copies for Birth, Marriage & Death Certificates for Genealogical Research Purposes

Release historic Birth, Marriage, and Death certificates for viewing online