English Records are now restricted
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English Records are now restricted and I am getting a message that I have the wrong type of account! I have been using it for years…this is new
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If your reference is to the England and Wales Birth Registration Index, this thread may be useful @Familysearch5624
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/188128/why-have-many-records-from-the-england-and-wales-birth-registration-index-suddenly-disappeared2 -
Every time that I see a thread on this topic, I get this horrible feeling that some people don't understand the basic fact that England & Wales Registration Indexes for 1837-1999 are fully available for free on the FreeBMD site. To say nothing, of course, about their appearance on most of the commercial websites.
The FS and FreeBMD versions contain the same data - the FreeBMD ones are a full replacement for the FS ones.
Caveats to "full replacement for the FS ones"
- The handling of marriage entries on the FS version may be slightly easier. I've not done a full comparison but everything that FS does / did can be done manually in FreeBMD;
- Yes, I recognise that the FS versions are easier to handle because they go through Source Linker, whereas you have to manually create your own sources if you use the FreeBMD versions. Then again, you need to learn how to do that anyway if you ever enter the full certificates as distinct from the index entries.
Apologies if this is a statement of the obvious to some of you.
(Any discussion of why FS Indexes are restricted and the equivalent FreeBMD indexes are not restricted is outside the scope of this discussion - not least because I haven't the faintest idea of the answer!)
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The main advantage of having these Registration collections as unrestricted on FamilySearch (apart from the ease of adding as sources) was the fact that there is often a difference between the detail on, say, the FS, FreeBMD and GRO versions.
A fault often found on the FreeBMD site is the incorrect recording of references. This is noticeable particularly with Marriages, when I often find an individual missing. This is commonly found where the writing is unclear in the original paper index and, say, the missing individual has been indexed with an incorrect page number - e.g., 253 instead of 263, so the spouse cannot be immediately identified. Checking the Find My Past version is usually the best option I have found - less mistakes in their indexing of reference numbers, it seems.
Also, I frequently report missing entries from the GRO birth index. These have either been indexed with a different surname spelling (say from that at FS or FreeBMD), or appear to be missing for no identifiable reason.(The reply that comes back from the GRO team (to my reports) in the latter case is: "Indexed data not available" - whatever that means!)
I admit that I was inclined to think it was a waste of FamilySearch's limited resources when the E&W registration collections first became available on FS (around 2015?), but quickly saw the positive aspects described above: easy to add as sources and they provided an alternative to existing collections on other websites, which contained many errors and omissions. (Regarding omissions, FreeBMD has quite sparse coverage beyond the mid-1990s, whereas FamilySearch had records into the 2000s, some of which were from alternative sources than the GRO (as evidenced by their including GB postcodes, which are not found through FreeBMD or GRO indexes).
It would be interesting to find out why, or by whom, permissions have been withdrawn to display these records on public accounts. Hopefully, this will all prove to be one big misunderstanding and these records will be restored, unrestricted, in the near future!
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"The main advantage of having these Registration collections as unrestricted on FamilySearch (apart from the ease of adding as sources) was the fact that there is often a difference between the detail on, say, the FS, FreeBMD and GRO versions. …"
Yes, that's always an advantage if the indexes are truly independent. (The GRO indexes, by the way, are completely new and not even compiled to the same rules - their indexing of illegitimate children with a father mentioned will be different. This can be a serious problem)
FS indexes originate from FindMyPast - as per "… England and Wales, Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 - … Index courtesy of Findmypast.com. …" (from the current Collection landing page). Not sure whether they were always from FMP - I have an idea that they weren't.
The later FS indexes into the 2000s, which @Paul W correctly states "… were from alternative sources than the GRO (as evidenced by their including GB postcodes, which are not found through FreeBMD or GRO indexes)" should not, in my personal opinion be in the same collection as their ultimate source is from newspaper reports, etc, all of which can be problematic, particularly in the extent of coverage.
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