Wendy wrote:Good evening all,
I have a suggestion that maybe the powers that be could print the information on a certificate then maybe we wouldn't go blind trying to .....much snipped........
They could do that for the on-line images, but it would take several years and several million £, maybe even 10s of £m.
What we have on-line are digitised images of the original registers which are not always easy to read due to the handwriting or the quality of the microfilm.
When the registers were microfilmed, the microfilm machine was set up for the whole register rather than being adjusted for individual pages, so that it can often happen that some pages are difficult to read for that simple reason, or, more often, not easy to read from a combination of the microfilm quality and the handwriting.
This was a simple cost decision, - to have ensured that the microfilmed copy of each register page was of optimum quality would have cost a large multiple of the actual cost for the procedure used.
Most people prefer to have an "extract", - a formal legally valid copy, - which is based on a copy of the original hand-written register entry.
Normally, if this copy is "iffy", then GROS will provide a typewritten extract in the first place. There are certain situations, such as illegitimacy, where a typewritten extract,
excluding the non-PC annotation "
illegitimate", will be supplied in the first place.
When the on-line image is problematic, GROS are also very willing to assist (as are many on this discussion group, - try us
)
It must also be realised that the info that we search in the on-line indexes is
only the info that was extracted from the register entries and placed in the indexes, - in other words by far from all the info that the original register entries contain.
See marva's comments re the excellent response from GROS when there is any problem interpreting a register entry.
Davie
Never backward in criticising GROS/SoL where such criticism is deserved, but also conscious of the need to explain fully the situation that they have to handle......
