Signature advice

Good to see you advocating the use of local certificates in the August issue. I often tell people this when I give talks on births, marriages and deaths, as the service is usually faster and the staff may even be willing to do some checking of details before issuing to make sure you get the right entry, but many researchers have no idea there is an option beyond the General Register Office.

However, I would raise an issue about original signatures. You do say to “check first that the register office in question uses scans of the original”. This is something that really needs stressing because very few registration offices would do that without a lot of persuasion; it certainly happened very rarely in the office where I was a deputy registrar. It can be done, but it is actually very difficult to produce a certificate on the correct form using a scanner/photocopier. There are multiple entries on each page of the register; the paper sizes don’t really match up; and getting a single entry, particularly from birth and death registers, onto the right part of a blank certificate is a quite complicated, multi-stage process. But the most important problem is that most old registers are just too fragile to be flattened onto the copier plate without risking splitting the spines and causing significant damage.

So the standard practice/instruction for certificate production from historic registers is to make a handwritten copy onto a blank certificate. In cases where a signature is really important, and the office are not willing to scan/copy the register, you could ask if a copy of just the signatures can be done by hand onto a piece of tracing paper and sent out with the certificate. That was something my registration office did quite regularly, and as a researcher I have found many offices are willing to do it if asked. Antony Marr Editor replies: Thank you for the clarification Antony.