Ever tried to find a birth certificate at official online UK sources? Unless you enjoy frustration blind alleys and failure then it is not to be recommended. Far easier to let the experts at a an ancestry website do the slog for you and come up with the goods in far less time than you can with the DIY approach. It is a relatively easy matter to get hold of a replacement copy of one’s own birth certificate direct from the GRO website. However any request even slightly more complex say your parents death certificate for example can become a maddeningly fruitless task. Especially if one doesn’t know the exact date of event. A common feature of DIY genealogists is a lack of hair. They have all torn it out while attempting to get grandma’s birth certificate from between 1903 and 1908 in the district of wherever which may or may not be available somewhere in cyberspace. The first obstacle to easy birth certificate access online at the GRO (General Register office) website is that not all official records birth certificates death and marriage certificates are not yet online. The register office is working hard at achieving 100% archive fulfilment but is only about 75% of the way there. All newly created birth certificates are put in the online archive as they are created but getting the historical data onto the database is a slow process. A further obstacle is that local register offices are growing their online archives at different rates. Patchy is the best way to describe the national scene when it comes to getting at birth records in the new connected era. All district offices have always kept good records of birth certificates marriages and deaths of all the people who are on their patch at the time of those events.