We do both at our diocesan office - we make the parish marriage registers availbale and we run the registration copy certificate service. In my experience they are quite different audiences with the majority of our registration customers requiring certificates for legal purposes such as court cases and identity issues. Our parish registers are used more for family and local history. We do not seem to have encountered problems with our registration colleagues and their income has not been affected by the registers being available through the record office. For the registers customers would have to come and hunt for themselves and then take away a print out, for registration they log their request and a certificate, which is a legal document, is sent to them. The GRO inspected this facility and found no reason to complain about the two services offering different routes into the records.
Juliette Baxter
Northamptonshire Record Office
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