All the more reason, also, for pressure to be put on all such repositories as TNA Kew to refuse to allow any and all monopoly access. The beauty of the E&W census is its being available through several different commercial providers. Would this were the case with all records. Judy Kay On 8 April 2014 14:20, Judy Lester <jlester@btinternet.com> wrote: > In the case of WO 97 there *is* no alternative. As a professional genealogist in London, I can assure you there is no physical access to WO 97 records at Kew. The documents have long since been archived, the films withdrawn from access, and everyone is forced to use FMP, whether professional, amateur or staff. As Caroline has said, the client will have to pay for the extra time taken to find the records. All the more reason for pressure to be put on FMP to get it right. > > > Judy > London, UK

Would that the problem was confined to the TNA - but its undoubtedly becoming a trend. I recently visited the LMA after years of not needing anything there, only to find that parish records are now "on ancestry" (which I already knew of course) and its relatively hard to get the films to view - though one can at least still do so with a bit of effort. My main reason for going was, among other things, needing to scan some parish records for an elusive ancestor with only a fairly wide date bracket and uncertainty over which parish anyway. I'd already experienced at home the absolutely dire slowness with which on can scan page after page on line - only to be met with this as a "satisfactory" solution in the Record Office itself. Roughly speaking I can scan through pages on a film at least 3 or 4 times as fast as i can online (and my home download speed is faster than the LMA for a start!) - and indeed the staff there told me they didn't know how to access a recordset to scan anyway rather than looking it up in a (probably faulty) index! As retrograde steps go this is yet another example. Its not that I don't welcome home access to records i would previously have travelled to see - it would be daft if I did - but online access is simply slower and less efficient for particular types of recordset searches and the archivists (if they still exist!) need to be aware of this - a Record Office needs to be rather more than a down-market internet cafe. Hugh Ainsley - the AINSLEY one name study