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by Peter Bennett
Published in the December 2007 edition of
"The Genealogist"
| ‘Outcry as GRO shuts down London service’ shouts
the headline in The National Archives’ ‘Ancestors’ magazine. There is a
petition, and condemnation comes from various sources, but it seems that
it will all go ahead anyway. By the time you read this I expect all the
original index volumes, which have been the backbone of family history research
in London since 1837, will have been moved into storage. It is going to be a great pity, especially as the promised online indexes are not going to be ready to replace the physical volumes. The date for the GRO’s own digital indexes has been slipping and slipping and now there is nothing at all concrete. The real hardship is going to fall on those doing more recent searches. There are some fairly complete indexes to the 19th and early 20th century records, and ‘Ancestry’ has done since 1984, but we regularly need to do a lengthy search for a death, say, from the 1920s, and that is much easier with the actual volumes to work with. There is also the problem when a record does not appear in the online indexes. The chances are that it has been recorded under some variant of the surname and it is much easier to cover all the possibilities on a printed page. There are numerous variations on my own surname, Bennett, and you will all have your own favourites. Then there is the regular mangling of forenames, either in spelling (try the variations of Harriett) or altering the order, George William registered as William George. Not to mention the children whose parents chose to register at birth as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Contrary to the belief of some, these are not all children who died soon after birth. I recently came across a wealthy merchant of Harley Street, London in the 1870s who registered his first two children correctly by name, then four as ‘male/female’, and two more possibly not registered at all, or at least not yet found in the indexes. But all that aside, we will soon have to get used to online or fiche searches for these events. All very well when the required entry pops up easily, it is just those difficult ones which will be more time-consuming. But then you people in Australia have been managing with fiche for many years so I shouldn’t complain too loudly. I have been away from the joys of researching in London recently, with a two week visit to Melbourne. As ever, it was nice to catch up with old friends at the AIGS library at Blackburn, and put some faces to names I have come across over the years. But perhaps best of all I enjoyed doing some of my own searches at Blackburn, the State Library and Public Record Office. I could even do some work on indexes at Box Hill Library, which really is an advance on what was available years ago. The only niggle I had was getting used to the extended document delivery times at North Melbourne. I should think all researchers would like to see rather quicker productions. Perhaps I am just spoilt at having just a 30 minute or so wait at Kew, and able to get through 40 documents in a 9am to 7pm day, but four documents every four hours or so does seem a bit slow. Despite that, it is a pleasant place to work in, and at least I had some successes in my searches. At the Family Records Centre recently I overheard an obvious newcomer to family history comment that ‘they make it look so easy on television’. That is a sure sign that we have another in the ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ series, tracing the ancestries of various well-known people. There are always grumblings that the producers gloss over the struggles most people have in fleshing out the stories behind the births, marriages and deaths. But at the same time the shows do bring our fascinating hobby to a wider audience and that cannot be a bad thing for everyone. It has been gratifying to read that the researchers of these programs spend months following up potential candidates, only to find themselves facing a total brick wall. A lot of effort goes into this work, but even the experts can occasionally reach a dead end. Just as so many lines of those of us who are not in the public eye can do. Word has come of more development at the British Library newspaper collection at Colindale. The long promised digitisation is still on the way, but the Colindale repository is now set to close by 2012. The newspapers held there are getting increasingly fragile so they need better storage facilities. It seems that more of the newspapers will be made available either digitally or on microfilm at the main St. Pancras site. That will save the long haul up to Colindale and if the process does push the digitisation program ahead then all the better. Seeing how ‘The Times’ has been opened up to researchers since the digital archive went online can only make the prospect of more such projects more exciting. So while we seem to be regressing in some of the provisions for family history over here, on the whole it has to be agreed that the amount of information we can discover about a given ancestor is just so much more than even ten years ago. Those who have been on the ancestor trail longer than that can only look back and be amazed at how technology has come to our aid. It is up to all researchers to grasp these opportunities. |
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