Hamilton

If you are an Australian researching your family history you will find that you are extremely well served with regards to obtaining information. The NSW Registry of births, deaths and marriages all provide an online service that is a family historians dream. And the most significant thing is they do not charge money for you to search their database. You don’t even have to fill in one of those annoying online ‘registration’ forms and have to come up with a silly user-name in order to search.

I have been visiting the UK and Irish state registry websites this past week trying to get some info on my partners great grandparents and I was struck by the way these places charge a fee before you can have access to the most basic information. Information that actually belongs to the public. I find this an absolute rip off; fair enough, I expect to pay for the issuing of certificates but I am strongly opposed to members of the public not being able to do a quick and basic online search for a relative who lived a hundred years back or further, for free.

If the NSW indexes can be made available online, for no charge at all, then why not the English, Scottish, Irish and Northern Ireland indexes as well?. To name but a few. Back in he old pre-internet days I could understand a cost being incurred; staff had to search and locate for you and this all took time. But with the internet now more than well established this information should be online and free to access. Right across the board.

Of course, money is behind the reasoning for this. They want you to pay, they want the revenue.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.