I must have read a different petition: the one I read was > > I have managed to get 10 Downing Street to allow an e-petition looking for > > support to have open access to the registers of Births, Marriages and > > Deaths from 1837 to 1908. > > > > This one act would enable all family historians and genealogists to find > > the right family certificate without having to purchase a copy certificate > > which turns out to be incorrect. So, as the index is currently available on FreeBMD, and all the index pages are also accessible through a number of pay-per-view sites, presumably the petitioner appears to require that the REGISTERS themselves be available? Once seen there would be (as the petitioner states) little or no requirement to purchase a certified copy of an entry. Or is there a different petition around? Now if the petitioner required the DoVE project to be re-instituted and made available, then I might be inclined to go along with the request. This project would improve the current index by including age at death, child's mother's maiden surname and spouse's surname from the start of registration, 1 July 1837. This is vital information for an index to be more efficient, though it requires money, resources and time to complete and put online. And, yes, that is tax-payers' money, and cases have been made against even that. However, the stumbling block has been the sheer enormity of that project and the cost of the hardware to complete it. Siemens presumably found it too much. Then came a change at the top with a change in government department. The size of a project to put online some kind of transcription from the registers themselves would possibly require a super-computer. As instead of a few fields for data as per the FreeBMD example, one requires fields for the whole of the marriage certificate date (this being the largest of the three). A suggestion that family historians be recruited to make some sort of new transcription or index from those registers at GRO sounds a dangerous one. I've done the computer inputting of projects after a number of experienced family historians have had a go at reading Victorian writing. Their efforts may not be quite on a par with the average non-English speaker but some of the errors I found were quite appalling. Given that for a short time in the recent bad weather conditions both TfL and other travel websites went down, as well as some of the mobile networks experiencing over-capacity, just who is going to foot the bill of the hardware to hold and run this date. We can't even afford an ambulance service computer system that works! And that surely is hugely more important. Perhaps one could ask the Court Service to speed up the process of digitising and indexing the Probate indexes from 1858? Very worth while. There is a huge quantity of resource material which really ought to be looked at. Certificate production is but one small, though vital, string. How about Court Sessions Papers, Middlesex Deeds Registry, York Wills, or even all those local BMD indexes, some of which are successfully on line, but some are not. It really is a question of funding, not just a willingness to organise the work. JK On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Gillian Kelly <gilliankelly@bigpond.com> wrote: > You know why JK? If for no other more generous reasons than because this > would be an index - people find the certificates they need and then they > BUY them. This puts much needed funds into the economy - and all countries > particularly welcome overseas funds into their coffers - and then there is > more money to sepend on taxpayers needs. Millions of researchers overseas > do not have an easy way of identifying certificates and therefore don't > purchase certificates - or they tie up staff with requests to do searches - > and this is taxpayers money! > > The NSW Australia experience, where you too can search indices for births > from 1788 to 1908, deaths from 1788 to 1978 and marriages from 1788 to 1958, > has been positive. The demands on staff has lessened and the sales from > these certificates has sky rocketed. > Gillian Kelly > > > > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "J K gen" <gen2mail@googlemail.com> > To: "NOTTSGEN" <nottsgen@rootsweb.com> > Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 12:20 AM > Subject: Re: [NTT] tr: Petition > > >> I might agree if I could ban free usage from overseas. Why should any >> part of my taxes be used to subsidise a hobby? >> JK >> >> >> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Jean WOOD <jeangrahame@orange.fr> wrote: >>> >>> I have just received this from another list, done it and hope others will >>> follow suit - it's easy to do. >>> >>> Jean >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>> >>>> This is something everyone should do. From a member of EOLFHS >>>> >>>> -------------------------------------------------- >>>> > I have managed to get 10 Downing Street to allow an e-petition looking >>>> > > for >>>> > support to have open access to the registers of Births, Marriages and >>>> > Deaths from 1837 to 1908. >>>> > >>>> > This one act would enable all family historians and genealogists to > >>>> > find >>>> > the right family certificate without having to purchase a copy > >>>> > certificate >>>> > which turns out to be incorrect. >>>> > >>>> > I hope you can support me in this as I feel it will make family > >>>> > history >>>> > just that little bit easier, after all these registrations are over > >>>> > 100 >>>> > years old. >>>> > >>>> > The link is http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/OpenBMDrecords/ >>>> > >>>> > >> >> >> Notts Surname List >> >> http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~hughw/notts.html >> >> ------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to >> NOTTSGEN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes >> in the subject and the body of the message >> > > >

Don't know if it will have anything of interest but Thursday 11.30 on Radio 4 is the The Monsarrat Archive, looking at the newly-opened archive of material from Nicholas Monsarrat, author of The Cruel Sea. It may be of interest as he spent some of his childhood at Gedling House - he's related to the family of John Turney through his mother (Ada Marguerite Turney) and he was a solicitor in Nottingham for a couple of years in the 30s. Torven

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but as an Australian taxpayer I have no objection to anyone being able to access the NSW records. The website I believe Gillian refers to gives enough detail to reduce the risk of ordering the incorrect certificate, but does not show you the certificate with all it's detail. This you buy. Perhaps the British system would be different. I've used pay per view and wasted my money because none of the results were what I had requested. I can't afford this, and nor can many other people. Another thing my taxes have helped pay for, which I'm happy to share, is the Australian National Archives site which has digitised the WW1 records of all members of the AIF. These records often include letters to/from family members. If anyone wants help locating Australian sites like this I'd be only too happy to help. All the best, Kate.

My apologies JK - I misread this to mean just an index. I do think this is a very tall order and quite regardless of the cost and who pays I think that in today's troubled times open access to such a huge amount of personal information borders on dangerous. Gillian Kelly

----- Original Message ----- From: "J K gen" <gen2mail@googlemail.com> To: "Gillian Kelly" <gilliankelly@bigpond.com> Cc: <nottsgen@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 12:22 PM Subject: Re: [NTT] tr: Petition > A suggestion that family historians be recruited to make some sort of > new transcription or index from those registers at GRO sounds a > dangerous one. I've done the computer inputting of projects after a > number of experienced family historians have had a go at reading > Victorian writing. Their efforts may not be quite on a par with the > average non-English speaker but some of the errors I found were quite > appalling. Hmm. The notion that all people who don't have English as their first language are worse at transcription work does not stack up. Example 1 The 1881 census index was done by English speakers in England and is nearly as error prone as most Ancestry indexes are for other census years. FMP's error rate is on a par with Ancestry's. Example 2 The 1901 indexing started by inmates of HM prisons, and I guess most spoke English, was so poor and slow that the work was contracted out to the Indian sub continent otherwise we would still be waiting for the TNA/PRO version. Never under estimate the ability of people from that foreign region to produce good to excellent results even though English is a second language to them. No transcription is ever going to be perfect. Anticipated error rate is 10% and to reduce this adds substantially to cost. I simply don't believe FMP's claim of 98.5% accuracy for their 1911 census. > Perhaps one could ask the Court Service to speed up the process of > digitising and indexing the Probate indexes from 1858? Very worth > while. At taxpayers expense ? Keith Wellington, NZ