Federation Of Family History Societies

Latest News on Civil Registration

 

FFHS representatives met recently with the GRO (General Register Office) management team for the DoVE (Digitisation of Vital Events) project to review progress on the project. The most important news we learnt was that a system is now being developed to enable the indexes to the digitised records to be searched via the internet, and these should be made available progressively from April 2008.

Work is well advanced on digitising the historic birth records (those from 1837-1934) and over 40 million of the 70 million records have already been processed. These have been loaded on to the EAGLE (Electronic Access to GRO Legacy Events) database. The EAGLE project will introduce a more efficient system of recording and tracking customer orders within the GRO at Southport, and its implementation is imminent.

Yet another bird's name has been chosen as the acronym for the third project - MAGPIE (Multi Access to GRO Published Index of Events). This will provide online indexes to the newly digitised records, and will be accessible via the internet, hopefully by April 2008. The FFHS has accepted the GRO's invitation to take part in user testing this new internet facility, although its search capabilities may be more restrictive than the wide-ranging possibilities we have asked for.

By April 2008, the historic birth indexes will have been loaded onto EAGLE and the historic death records (those from 1837-1957) should also have been loaded. This means that those indexes will be accessible via the MAGPIE system on screen terminals at TNA at Kew (as well as via the internet) when the ONS facilities at the Family Records Centre close. Subsequently, the loading of the historic death records will be followed by the modern birth and death records, then the historic marriage records (those from 1837-1945) and the modern marriage records.

For those records that have not been added to the MAGPIE project by April 2008, access will be available at Kew, as an interim measure, to the images of the existing indexes on microfiche and on computer. The original vellum and paper indexes will be moved to TNA at Kew, but will not be on open access.

As a separate process, the Registrations Online project that deals with current registrations (2007 onwards) will provide indexes of these on terminals at the FRC by July of this year, with an interim search capability that will be more basic than that eventually offered by MAGPIE.

We will continue to keep you informed of developments in this important area.

Geoff Riggs,
Chairman,
Federation of Family History Societies
6 February 2007