Genealogy Chat

I have just received this email from a museum, about the bmd indexing. See below and sorry if this is already known to you all.

This petition regarding electronic indexing of BMD registers was created by John Fairlie and reads:

'We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Mandate the electronic indexing and free public searching thereof of locally held records of Birth, Marriage and Death at Register Offices across England and Wales.'
If any reader has not signed, or is unaware of the e-Petition I have raised on 10 Downing Street, to enlarge the UKBMD base, then it would be appreciated if you could click on this link, and add your signature please.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/LocalBMDIndexing/
If you have signed it already - thank you. Please bear in mind that you can also get your wife/husband/friends to sign it too. It is not limited to one signature per household!
The petition has already amassed 3,155 signatures and is in the top 65 of the most popular petitions out of over 8,000, but every extra signature helps and is much appreciated.

When going on the site for further details this is what it says.
Local Register Offices (part of Local Government) are the primary contact for people wanting copies of Birth, Marriage or Death certificates. GRO Southport is a secondary contact having photocopies of the primary locally held registers. As such, Local Register Offices hold a mine of information for UK residents and Family Historians alike. These records are found and managed almost universally by old hand written indexes in cloth bound books and ledgers. While the public can legally access the indexes in person at each office, this mode of access is unacceptable in this day and age. Also, that any modern day business can still work like this in the 21st century is appalling. This petition seeks support to force local Register Offices to electronically index their records from 1837 to 2007 when a new on-line electronic registration system was introduced. While some areas have already opted to do this under the auspices of the UKBMD umbrella, and publish data on freely searchable web databases, other areas show no such inclination. This petition seeks to mandate that action.