As I understand it the fiche production is a requirement for the newest events, none of which form part of an online database. Whether it should be is another question. The main question is whether the fiche production process is cheaper than a paper printout from the computerised registrations from all the ROs in England and Wales. The current distribution of these sets of fiche is presumed to be more convenient to some users than the old address of St Catherine's House or Family Records Centre - which, until online indexes became available, were the only place to view. JK

On 21 Oct at 21:39, J K gen <[email protected]> wrote: > As I understand it the fiche production is a requirement for the > newest events, none of which form part of an online database. Whether > it should be is another question. And this other question is one that we should address. I am sure that at Middleton Street we were able to access the post 1984 indices on a computer, effectively on-line. This made for fast and effective searches and certainly the online database for 1984 to 2005/6 is very effective. The last time I registered anything, I believe it had to be done at a computer terminal and the data was held on a database and only printed if required. The master copy is no longer on paper. Assuming that registrations are still computer entered (by the registrars), the data for recent events, 2006 to 2011, must be on some database. It does not make any sense to then go for physical copies to fiche. What maggot is in the brain of the government bean-counters that forbids them to allow us online access to data that is already on line? Is this not something that all the genealogical societies should get together on and have a big campaign on? I know that the project to computerise and deliver all registered data has run out of money and stalled, but there cannot be major expense required to provide access to the recent registrations. I can believe that many commercial outfits would be delighted to provide an on-line system to give index information for the price of adding a few adverts. It might even be that the FreeBMD gurus would do a better job for almost nothing. Or have I sadly misunderstood something? -- Tim Powys-Lybbe [email protected] for a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/