“There will never again be public access to the paper records, the index to where in the country all the births, marriages and deaths were registered, but – as so often with government IT projects – the timetable for the online version intended to replace them has collapsed. According to a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for the General Records Office, ‘the present target is to have the online index available by mid-2009’. In the meantime, researchers are invited to use microfiche, which means, one furious researcher said, that ‘not even God himself is going to be able to find most of this stuff’.”