Save the UK family tree
The true story behind Britain’s bungled digitised records
As I embark on the building of the Stevenson family tree, Sarah Williams, editor of Who Do You
Think You Are, issues a warning. “It’s quite addictive,” she said. “It’s like a serious eBay habit, but you know, instead of buying yet more pots… [you’re] buying ancestors, collecting them.”
This proves to be true. Over the following weeks, my family tree at ( see
Descendents Reunited, p44) takes ever more elaborate shape as I pluck great aunts and uncles from obscurity, and pore over birth indices and military records. It replaces Twitter; faced with five spare minutes, I find myself shoring up the particulars of my great-great grandfather or despairing at the Stevensons’ frustrating habit of using Sydney as a middle name, but not being able to decide whether to spell it with a Y or an I.
Irregular names are far from the only frustration for amateur genealogists, and certainly not the most irritating. Despite the best part of £10 million being spent on digitising Britain’s vast archives of birth, death and marriage certificates, they remain offline more than a decade after the project began.
Instead, you’re forced to rely on expensive private archives or copies sent from paper archives. How has Britain got to 2016 with its family history trapped on paper and microfiche? Fractured families The complexity of building a decent family tree soon becomes clear. Discovering that an ancestor existed is simple; indices for birth, death and marriage certificates are easy to find. However, the indices are far from fleshed-out. The birth index gives you a person’s birth name, place and, after 1911, their mother’s maiden name, but nothing else. Even the precise date of an event is missing – you’re left with a three-month range. Likewise, a marriage index provides the names of the couple and venue, but details such as their parents and occupations are saved for the official marriage certificate.
These certificates – the most solid, useful evidence about our ancestors – are available, but the process by which you obtain them is old-fashioned. Birth, death or marriage certificates can only be ordered from the General Register Office (GRO) – part of the Passport Office. You’ll need the details from the relevant index so that GRO can locate the record, and then, £9.25 and a week later, you’ll receive a copy of the certificate. I work out that a single certificate for each of my relatives would set me back almost £200.
Instantly searchable, transcribed records wouldn’t only make researching family trees much easier, they’d also bring wider benefits. Professor Chris Dibben is the principal investigator at Digitising Scotland, a vast project designed to process 14 million birth records, four million marriage records and 11 million death records between 1855 and 1973. “The arguments we made to the funder [the Economic and Social Research Council] was for the research potential of this data,” he told me. “It could be used to facilitate social science and health research in the future.”
Records can help researchers and governments understand patterns of disease and social mobility, with lessons that can be applied globally. Scotland’s records cover a period of vast industrialisation and air pollution. “In many industrialising countries around the world – for example, in India or China – their populations are being exposed to air pollution,” Dibben noted. “They don’t know what’s going to be the impact on their populations in 20 or 30 years’ time, but with this historical Scottish data we can look forward.”
The Digitising Scotland project has the potential to be a research dataset to facilitate social science and health research in the future