From the newsletter of the Toronto Family History Centre: England & Wales Certificate Ordering Service Progress of Digitisation Projects Your editor (for this week) has always been a fan of the UK birth, marriage and death certificate ordering service provided by the GRO at Southport. They produce over 2 million certificates a year and nearly all of them are mailed within one week. I know of no other jurisdiction that comes anywhere near approaching this level of consistent service. In 2004 the GRO announced that their entire, and ever expanding collection of certificates was to be digitised– the DoVe (Digitisation of Vital Events) project – which was to lead to a more efficient service for supplying certificates. Certificates would be produced direct from the digitised images rather than being copied from microfiche. Alongside this project was the MAGPIE (Multiple Access to GRO Published Events) project which was to supply new and improved indexes of Births, Marriages and Deaths on-line. From 1837 onwards the birth indexes would show the maiden name of the mother, the marriage indexes the name of the spouse and the death indexes the age at death of the decedent. Thus while the DoVe project had advantages for the GRO it was the MAGPIE project that promised real benefits to the genealogical community. In August 2005 it was announced that the DoVe and MAGPIE digitisation contract had been awarded to Siemens IT Solutions with completion anticipated by the end of 2007. By July 2007 it was reported that the DoVe project was running 12 months behind schedule but nevertheless 69 million pre-1935 birth records had been received and had passed the Quality Assurance test. This included the scanned images and the data required to populate the new index. Various reports have been published indicating that further delays were to be expected with the DoVe project and while there have been rumours regarding the future of the MAGPIE project nothing seems to have been published officially. Your editor has been in touch with the GRO on this subject and has received the following from the Communications Manager dated 6 March 2008:- The digitisation of GRO Records (DoVE project ) is scheduled for completion during mid/late 2009 and GRO has begun to use DoVE data already available for certificate production from February 2008. It is intended that the DoVE data will form the basis of an on-line index which will provide a valuable new means of access to the index data and which will replace the current index available on microfiche. The publication of this index is part of the MAGPIE (Multi Access to GRO P ublic Index of Events) Project. The project is currently in a pause and review stage as GRO moves to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) and a review of the cost, timescales and scope of the project is undertaken. The current estimate is that the digitised index will be available to the public from 2010 and as the project progresses further updates will be provided. From the reply one gets the uneasy feeling that the best that can be hoped for is a 2010 availability but there is a distinct possibility that this might not happen. Presumably the pre-1935 births data has already been paid for. Why cannot the GRO, at very little cost, go the extra mile and make a new index available showing the maiden name of the mother for the 1837-1911 period where that vital information is currently missing? So far as I am aware the GRO have not previously officially announced their intentions with regard to the MAGPIE project, one so important to researchers of UK genealogy. Can I ask our readers to pass this section of the Bulletin on to all the genealogy sites with whom they are associated so that this news receives maximum publicity.