<<snipped>> And The National Archives can do a fully on-line wills facility and I can only imagine it is economically viable, so why can't the Probate Registry achieve the same. <<snipped>> I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. TNA's online facility for wills covers only the "Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1383-1858", which must be a very small number by comparison with the post-1858 wills - and it's a fixed dataset. <<snipped>> ... BMD certs. If people want a certified copy they can pay extra and have it posted. <<snipped>> Incidentally, I know you're not suggesting that the provision of uncertified copies would save money, but others do. Peter Calver of Lost Cousins, on the other hand, established that "the cost of the paper and printing is just 16p per certificate", so there's no massive potential by not putting that stamp on. <<snipped>> A PPC deal with some private provider could finance [digitisation of BMD certs]. ... This is a scandal of incompetence and probably staff hoarding that needs opening up a bit. <<snipped>> Very possibly. On the other hand, I've heard of no-one actually going to government saying "Let's do it for you", suggesting there's no immediate prospect of profit for anyone. Personally I doubt many Registrars want to keep that much hold of the data - though some might. If you're set up to record _today's_ registrations, then I'm sure the staffing levels will be aimed at providing the contemporary legal and "professional" service, not to deal with family historians, so all this family history lark just plain gets in the way. It seems to me that no commercial provider like Ancestry would want to produce a system that satisfied both family historians and current legal requirements. What's needed is a cut-off (as per ScotlandsPeople) beyond which the provider could just deal with family historians, rather than trying to piggy-back family historians off the back of a system providing contemporary legal and "professional" services, which has to be built to a much higher level of robustness, security, etc, etc. Adrian B