PROBATE AND CONFIRMATION
If your ancestor’s estate was taken through the probate process, several free sites exist to help locate information, whether a will was left or not. For England and Wales the civil courts-based probate process commenced in 1858, with summaries of all adjudications recorded in the National Probate Calendar. These can be freely searched on the Probate Service’s website at probatesearch.service.
gov.uk, although there is a fee to order a copy of the original grant of probate or letter of administration. A free index to soldiers’ wills is also available from the same website, including name, regimental number and date of death.
Prior to 1858 the Church of England was responsible for probate in England and Wales, although it can be problematic to locate the relevant ecclesiastical court within the Church’s hierarchy. If an ancestor’s estate went through the highest court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, you can locate when this happened through the National Archives website at bit.ly/wills1384-1858. Additional basic indexes from other courts across the country can be freely utilised on findmypast.co.uk, and at least confirm a name, year and occupation, although unless you are a subscriber you need to sign up for the free two weeks’ trial to see the full record. If your ancestor was Welsh, pre-1858 ecclesiastical probate records can be freely searched at bit.ly/welsh-wills.
In Scotland the probate system was known as ‘confirmation’, and carried out through the civil courts from 1562. A basic summary of all confirmed cases can be found on scotlandspeople.gov.uk from 1513 to 1925. A slight difference in Scotland concerned heritable property, which could not be left in a will until 1868. Prior to this, a separate court-based inheritance process existed, the Services of Heirs, by which the heir (usually the eldest son) would have to prove their right to inherit; judgements for 1544–1699 are freely available on books.google.co.uk in three volumes at bit.ly/retours1, bit. ly/retours2 and bit.ly/retours3, although they are in Latin.
Meanwhile the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland freely offers calendars for all Northern Irish court cases from 1858 to 1965, and access to images of surviving wills from 1858 to 1909, at bit.ly/proni
wills. For the whole of Ireland, various wills calendar entries and copies of wills are at genealogy. nationalarchives.ie. Additional calendar entries for 1922–1985 are available via the National Archives of Ireland catalogue at national archives.ie/search-the-archives.