There have been some highs and lows for family historians over here recently, but fortunately the highs in the form of interesting new sources to help us on our way greatly outnumber the lows.  That is not to say the lows are insignificant, so I will get them out of the way first.

The General Register Office announced that from April the price of certificates was to rise from £7.00 to £9.25.  It has been some years since the last rise, so the annual rate of increase is not too bad.  But they have also discovered that they do not have a legal power to run the checking service.  Until now this has allowed us to submit an application for say a death before 1866 from when ages are shown in the index, with a check that the deceased be of a stated age, or within a range of years.  If the subject of the application was not of the age given then the certificate was not issued and part of the fee was refunded.

This system has been very useful, although great care had to be exercised in using it.  On top of that, there were cases when the clerk at the GRO would occasionally misread the entry, and knock back the application.  I had one such case from years ago which I found was indeed the right entry when the National Burial Index came along and confirmed it, and there have been many others. 

Anyway, rather than change the law, the powers that be have decided that checking has to go, so now we need to be even more certain than ever that the entry found in the index is the right one.  There are ways to confirm your choice of course.  The IGI might have the entry, or the National Burial Index, or even if you are lucky the online newspapers could have solved the problem. 

The GRO did, however, attempt to placate the family historians by announcing that the project to provide online indexes to the records of births, marriages and deaths is to be resurrected.  They really need to supply an index, and free, for they are bound by law to do so.  A start was made a few years ago, and abandoned, but they are planning to get it under way again.  There is no legislation to allow images of the certificate entries to be put online, but an index will be a start.  It will of course largely duplicate the work of others, but as I have mentioned before, if you don’t find the entry you want in one place, it is always useful to have another to turn to.

Apart from that, there is the usual ever increasing range of sources to help us in our search for more distant ancestors, or to add to our knowledge to those we already know about.  It is that ‘putting flesh on the bones’ aspect that I personally enjoy most, perhaps because so many of my lines are pretty well at a standstill, so I am always looking for places where I might discover a little more.

One of the web sites which I look to fairly often is www.deceasedonline.org  This organisation is busy loading up details of burials from the cemeteries run by local authorities, as opposed to parish churches.  They have recently added entries from Cambridge from 1903 to 2005 to their collection of records from some London boroughs, as well as others in Kent, Lincolnshire and Scotland.  You will have to pay to see full details, but the basic search results are pretty useful, giving name, date and place of burial. 

Ireland is a problem, as we all know, but little bits of new material come along from time to time.  The ‘Pilot’ part of the IGI has the birth, marriage and death indexes, which helps a lot.  Now the Origins site, as www.originsnetwork.com has put up Cantwell’s ‘memorials of the dead’, with some 60,000 names from gravestones.  They are mainly from the counties of Wicklow, Wexford, Galway, Kildare, Clare, Cork, Sligo and Dublin so there is a good coverage.

Those with more recent Irish connections will be using the 1911 census of Ireland, now complete (and free!) online at www.census.nationalarchives.ie  The 1901 census will also be put on the internet in time. 

Up in Scotland, Roman Catholic registers have been added to the collections at Scotlands People, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk They cover the years 1703 to 1955, so there could well be some who have hitherto been unable to find much sign of their ancestors until now.  The Scots now have indexes to the modern births, marriages and deaths from 1855 to 2006.  But images cannot be seen online for recent events.  For those the certificate has to be purchased.

I recently read ‘The Lost Villages of Britain’ by Richard Muir (The History Press, 2009) and was interested to read of the evictions of people from the Highlands of Scotland.  He records that there were 1,740 writs of removal served on Skye between 1840 and 1880.  Between 1855 and the 1880s the population there fell from 23,000 to 17,000.  This put me in mind of the boatloads of Scots from Skye which appeared in Melbourne around this time. 

In spite of the recession, money is being found to start new projects and extend old ones.  The British Library has just announced that their range of fully searchable online newspapers has had another million pages added, taking the total to over three million, so that is a huge increase.  Papers have been added from Chester, Nottingham, Cornwall the Isle of Man and two more from London.  I find it is always interesting to see how the same event is reported in different places.  I recently found the death of a London solicitor in several London papers, but the fullest report was from Sheffield.  He had no family link to Yorkshire, but had done some work there the previous year and the local editor saw fit to give his death more space than elsewhere.

Grants have also been announced for the cataloguing of various archives, including those of Hawkins and Co., solicitors of Hitchin, Hertfordshire.  They are the second oldest firm of solicitors in England, so their records could have much useful information.  Another project will see the Quarter Sessions records of the North Riding of Yorkshire properly catalogued.  Depending on the detail they go into, this could open up a class of records which are generally very difficult to use unless a date is already known.

And while on increases measured in the millions, the National Burial Index, third edition, has just been released.  It has about a third more entries that on the last version, with over 18 million entries.  There just has to be something there for everyone, surely.

Lastly, with much on certificates in this Letter, I would mention a recently solved problem which might give others some hope.  The marriage of John Spinks and Jane Henderson circa early 1870s had been a lost cause for many years.  There was a likely John Spinks, but the certificate revealed that his wife was Jane Anderson.  However, on obtaining a copy of the entry from the original parish register it is clear that the clerk has put her name as Anderson in the body of the entry, but she has clearly signed ‘Jane Henderson’. 

GRO certificates are never a reproduction of the original entry, which is why I always like to see the original of a marriage, where you get the signature of the ancestor if nothing else extra. But the original, as with any record, might also reveal an error in transcription.

So there you are, there could be hope for any of the problems which beset this work. Good luck with your own.

Peter Bennett