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.

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