Are historic certificates arriving from the GRO in the current pandemic?

[melba_schmelba]

I really can't understand why people are surprised that they are having to wait for non essential things like certificates, during a time unlike anything we've gone through before. I expect the GRO may had had to furlough a lot of staff, plus having to cope with staff who may have had to self isolate and arrange the work space to cope with social distancing. It clearly states on their page (and has done from the beginning) that there will be delays AND they ask people not to order unless urgent. So if people choose order anyway, or don't bother to read that warning, they can't then complain when they don't get a certificate in the normal time.

The problem is some people will not have seen the warning if they don't log out on their browser.

[carol80]

Don't forget that people are dying and babies are being born. These people would be the priority.
I am sure like me you can wait till things settle down.
 Carol

[cbowley]

For me it isn't so much the delay itself as different people experiencing different delays. I expected delays to be similar.

The Freedom of Information request has an interesting passage - "all records must be certified by the district where the event occurred as a true copy of the register entry, before the General Register Office is able to provide a copy of that event either by certificate or PDF". If the GRO has to contact a district office before sending out a certificate maybe the irregular delays are due to different district offices taking different amounts of time.

[groom]

Don't forget that people are dying and babies are being born. These people would be the priority.
I am sure like me you can wait till things settle down.
 Carol

At the moment they are not even accepting birth registrations, and there are very few marriages taking place. The indexes will make interesting reading for the second quarter of 2020 - no births registered, just a few marriages but over 50.000 deaths.

[carol80]

May make people harder to find in the future. I agree it should make for interesting searches.
Carol

[arthurk]

The Freedom of Information request has an interesting passage - "all records must be certified by the district where the event occurred as a true copy of the register entry, before the General Register Office is able to provide a copy of that event either by certificate or PDF". If the GRO has to contact a district office before sending out a certificate maybe the irregular delays are due to different district offices taking different amounts of time.

No, you've misunderstood the process. It comes up here fairly regularly, and if you do a search for "GRO quarterly returns" (without the quotes) you should find some relevant discussions.

Births, marriages and deaths are registered at a local register office, and once a quarter a copy of these records is sent off to the GRO with a signed certificate to the effect that they are a true copy of the entries in the register held in the office.

Marriages can also take place and be registered at a place of worship, with the minister acting as registrar; in this case the minister writes out the quarterly return and certifies that it is a true copy of the register that he/she holds. The minister sends the quarterly return to the local register office, and they collate the returns for the whole district and send them off to the GRO.

The certification mentioned in the Freedom of Information request has always been part of the process - or to put it another way, if the GRO has a BMD record, it was already certified when the GRO received it.

[AntonyMMM]

At the moment they are not even accepting birth registrations, and there are very few marriages taking place.

Births are now being registered again, started up again two or three weeks ago I think.

[LizzieL]

If it was already in digital format you might have a point, but my understanding is that they are only scanned as and when needed. I don't know if the scans are then saved for any subsequent orders.

My OH got the Family History bug badly (if that's the right word!) just after lockdown started. I had bought him a DNA test for Christmas 2018 and he did it, but didn't bother too much about with his matches (Ancestry). He was a bit unsure about the death of his g-grandmother - two ladies with same name (married name) died within a year of each other at similar age in adjacent districts. He found a tree for a third cousin which had the death date for the lady which was his second choice based on where the family had been living on previous censuses. He ordered PDFs of both death certs. They both came well within a week, quicker than I've had any in normal times. Could that be because his third cousin had already ordered them some time ago - having had the same dilemma with the two ladies - and they had already been scanned.?

[davidft]

They both came well within a week, quicker than I've had any in normal times. Could that be because his third cousin had already ordered them some time ago - having had the same dilemma with the two ladies - and they had already been scanned.?

Possibly. 

I have a theory (totally unproven) that the reason some certificates arrive much quicker than others is either

1. The certificate has been requested before and so it is easier / quicker for them to access and produce a new certificate, or

2. When a request comes in the system identifies which film/ledger they are on. If there are files with lots of requests for certificates by just processing that one file they produce lots of certificates whereas films that only have one certificate request are more time consuming to produce and do not get any sort of "priority"