Buying certificates and economical searches

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Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby YorksClare » Mon Jan 13, 2014 6:24 pm

I thought it might help to post up here where to get birth, marriage or death certificates, and how much to expect to pay for the service from the various sources. I know that a lot of "service provider" websites are out there these days, some of which pretend to be parallel services to government sites when actually they are at best a conduit, at worst a complete scam. (DVLA copy sites are a particular problem.)

So here goes:

http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/ is the page to go to if you want to set up an account to order General Register Office certificates online. The FAQ is here https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/cert ... teProblems and provides quite a lot of very good information about the certificates available, what to expect to find on them, and how to interpret some of the information they give.

I know you can order them through Ancestry as well, but I think they cost more on there.
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby Northern Lass » Tue Jan 14, 2014 9:07 am

You can also order via your local registry office if the event took place in that area.
I use both GRO and Local Regis offices
Dudley and Sandwell Registry Office and Birmingham have been fantastic.
:grin:
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby YorksClare » Thu Jan 16, 2014 7:29 pm

That's very useful. Unfortunately, the tricky records I am after are from all over...

The biggest problem is that I am trying to trace my great-grandfather and his family in Glasgow, and it seems that you cannot buy the Scotland record copies as easily as you can buy the England and Wales ones. I would love to be wrong on this, so if someone knows how to get through the weird website at ScotlandPeople, please help!

I have finally given in and spent £9.25 per copy on three records that should hopefully unlock most of the brick walls I have been stuck on for over a month.
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby grangers14 » Thu Jan 16, 2014 7:54 pm

Scotlands people work out cheaper than England and hold much more info!
Try narrowing down your search so you dont waste money!
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby Northern Lass » Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:56 am

YorksClare wrote:That's very useful. Unfortunately, the tricky records I am after are from all over...

The biggest problem is that I am trying to trace my great-grandfather and his family in Glasgow, and it seems that you cannot buy the Scotland record copies as easily as you can buy the England and Wales ones. I would love to be wrong on this, so if someone knows how to get through the weird website at ScotlandPeople, please help!

I have finally given in and spent £9.25 per copy on three records that should hopefully unlock most of the brick walls I have been stuck on for over a month.


Other Registry offices all over the Uk are very helpful too.
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby gardener » Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:22 am

YorksClare wrote:The biggest problem is that I am trying to trace my great-grandfather and his family in Glasgow, and it seems that you cannot buy the Scotland record copies as easily as you can buy the England and Wales ones. I would love to be wrong on this, so if someone knows how to get through the weird website at ScotlandPeople, please help!


Does this help?
http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/famrec/bdm.html
"The present is the key to the past" - Charles Lyell
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby gardener » Fri Jan 17, 2014 11:32 am

You probably got this email too?

"Release of the New Year BMD images on ScotlandPeople and some highlights from these new records
Happy New Year! After 'seeing in the bells' at Hogmanay and New Year, we added the New Year BMD images to the ScotlandsPeople website. So you can now view the images of records for births in 1913, marriages in 1938 and deaths in 1963."
"The present is the key to the past" - Charles Lyell
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby YorksClare » Sun Jan 19, 2014 11:03 pm

I have an Ancestry account which is £19 per month, more or less, and I can trawl through all the records they have here or around the world for that, at my leisure as many times as I like, downloading whatever files I need, discarding, duplicating, etc to my heart's content. I cannot see that it is cheaper in Scotland, or as easy.

Firstly, ScotlandsPeople advertises a "free search", but all it really seems to do is let you type in a name and then it says "we have X number of birth data, X number of census data" etc "with that name". You then have to register with the site and buy credits. 30 credits cost £7.

For every page of 25 results in an index search (in the parish registers, census registers, Catholic parish registers and statutory registers) you are charged one credit. Therefore, you essentially would have to know a lot of stuff before you search to avoid losing loads of credits searching through the information displayed. Each record you decide to open to view the scanned image costs you 5 credits. The website says that this means reading one index page and opening one of the resulting documents would cost a minimum of £1.40.

Searching the list of wills and testaments is free, but each document you download costs 10 credits, which the site says would cost about £2.33. Searching coats of arms is free, but each document download costs £10.

I am pretty quick on Ancestry now, and I can easily attach several items in ten minutes to a particular person as long as the data makes sense. 7 census reports, a birth, marriage, death and a will can easily be racked up by one person, and when I know their family that is easy to do several times over in an hour. If all my relatives were in Scotland, or I had done my current research at the rates ScotlandsPeople charge, I would be spending £100s in a month! :o

To order a copy of a birth certificate for my great-grandad, which I think is my best way forward, I either have to send by post or fax a form SU3 here http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/files2/f ... ds/su3.pdf to the Scottish General Records Office. I could telephone in the details too. I have to say that this was not very clearly explained on the website, and I really had to hunt around for it. http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/files2/f ... let-s2.pdf gives the charges - it costs £15 for an "extract" (which is actually the full birth certificate) without going for the priority service - it would be £9.25 in England or Wales.

So no, it doesn't seem to be any cheaper, in fact a heck of a lot more expensive than searching in England or Wales.
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Re: Buying certificates and economical searches

Postby AndrewA » Thu Jan 30, 2014 10:10 pm

I have a video for this!
Hit a Brickwall? Have you lost all trace of someone? Do not despair, simply make a note they were abducted by aliens! Don't believe in aliens? No problem, just write them off as having disapeared in a time portal
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