8 Try wills
Only a few years ago probate records for all but the hardcore genealogist were mostly confined to using the National Probate Calendar on ancestry.co.uk. Now wills have become easier to track down and simpler to order, they can play a crucial role in solving your riddles. Post-1858 wills have become much easier to order thanks to the Government’s probate website ( probatesearch.service.gov.uk). The National Probate Calendar can be searched for free here, but it’s not as easy to use as the version on Ancestry and involves a certain amount of browsing. You can order post-1858 wills via the website for £10 each. Pre-1858 wills have also become easier to track down, now that more and more archives and family history societies are indexing collections (for example the Bristol Archives wills index at archives.bristol.gov.uk/willsindex.aspx). If you come across an ancestor’s name in a wills index, don’t make any assumptions until you have ordered a copy of the original. It’s often not until you see the actual document that you can be sure it’s the will of the person you are looking for. If you are searching for a Welsh ancestor pre-1858 then you are in luck, because wills held by the National Library of Wales can be accessed online for free via bit.ly/ nlw-wills. For Scottish ancestors, a large number of wills and testaments ranging from 1513 to 1925 can be downloaded via scotlandspeople.gov.uk for £2.50 each.
Wills can be helpful for tracking down a missing death, but they can also be used to break down other brick walls. The wills of childless couples and unmarried aunts and uncles can prove particularly revealing, because they may spread their assets across numerous nephews and nieces. This can be handy when you have ‘lost’ a woman, because if she has changed her name on marriage but is mentioned in a relative’s will, it will state her married name as well as, usually, the relationship that she had with the deceased.
Wills can also be used to rule out or confirm potential candidates for a lost ancestor (especially pre-civil registration when parish registers may lack the necessary detail). I was once looking for a Thomas Somerville in Carnwath, Lanarkshire, and there was more than one option in the parish registers. Unfortunately only one had a will available on ScotlandsPeople, but it did at least enable me to rule him out.