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The cost of ordering copies of birth, marriage and death records from the General Register Office (GRO) is due to increase in February.
The GRO website enables researchers to order copies of birth, marriage and death certificates, as well as digital copies of birth and death records, in England and Wales, dating from the introduction of civil registration in 1837: www.gro.gov.uk/ gro/content/certificates.
Increased charges for this service, which come into force on 16 February 2019, will see the cost of certificates rise from £9.25 to £11. The cost of the priority service, which allows delivery on the next working day, will rise from £23.40 to £35.
PDF copies of birth and death records, introduced by the GRO in 2017, will rise in price from £6 to £7, with priority deliveries available at £45. The increased fees are the first pricing changes at the GRO since 2010.
For the first time, certificates ordered via local register offices will be priced at the same level as those ordered via the GRO. In the past, researchers who wanted to order a copy of the original record direct from the local register office had to pay a higher rate of £10. This will now rise to £11 in line with the GRO rate.
Other fees are also coming into play that may affect family historians. If researchers make an application to the GRO for a record without knowing the index reference, there will be an additional non-refundable fee of £3 in exchange for GRO staff carrying out a search of the index.
Currently, this service is free and enables researchers to specify details, such as names of parents, before ordering a certificate. However, the new birth and death indexes on the GRO website have now made it easier for researchers to pinpoint the correct certificate.
Researchers who do not wish to pay the £3 search fee will need to provide an index reference, available from genealogy subscription sites and freebmd.org.uk. A new fee of £3.50 is being introduced if the GRO is unable to fulfil an order because staff cannot locate the record with the information provided.
There will also be a new flat fee of £11 to purchase certificate copies immediately after registering a new birth or death, replacing the current three-tier system. Details of all the new pricing can be found at bit.ly/stat-inst.
Antony Marr, a professional genealogist and member of the council of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA), told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine that he accepted that the GRO’s prices would have to go up after remaining fixed “for a considerable time”, but hoped that the increased revenue would be used to improve services for family historians.
In particular, he said that he would like the revenue to be used to extend the GRO’s digitisation scheme, so that PDF marriage records also become available.
Similarly, he hoped that the increased income at local register offices would allow them to increase staffing to better fulfil orders of records from family historians.
‘Certificates ordered via local at register offices will be priced the same rate as via the GRO’