Thank you to all those who responded to this. >From those responses, it seems that the general view of members is that these indexes for recent BMD events in England and Wales are not seen as a top priority though many would be interested in collecting this data if access could be provided through a look up service. There seems to be agreement that deaths are the most interesting data. As mentioned, although there is a Guild project to offer look-ups for these records, we currently have no volunteers to do this and the task is not an easy one. We will need to consider how to proceed – and this discussion has been very helpful. If there are other comments, please continue to post or contact me by email. It was mentioned that deaths for England and Wales to 2015 were now on Ancestry. Ancestry has a collection called “England and Wales Death Index 2007-2015” – but this is not the GRO indexes. The source is shown as GreyPower Deceased Data compiled by Wilimington Millennium, West Yorkshire. There was some discussion around this when the record set was launched – it appears data is sourced from Funeral Directors and Obituary Notices. Thanks to Phil for adding the Central Library at Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the list of places where the details are available. This has somehow slipped off our list. A Freedom of Information request made in 2011 received a response which included the following: “The Registrar General has a statutory responsibility to make the indexes available to the public free of charge for searching purposes and this duty is currently discharged via the 7 host sites across England and Wales. These arrangements are expected to continue until such time as we are able to make the indexes available online via GRO’s digitisation project. This project is currently in a pause status and further information will be posted on the Home Office website.” So it would seem that the intention for the longer term is to make these details available online via the GRO website. Details will not be sold or made available to any other sites or data providers. It might be interesting to try to get an update on this position. With best wishes. Stephen Daglish – Volunteers Co-ordinator(4509)