TRACK DOWN YOUR FAMILY WILLS
As more and more indexes go online, it has never been easier to locate a will. Margaret McGregor explains why they are so useful for breaking brick walls
Wills are an incredibly useful resource – and they have never been easier to find
Until 1858 wills were brought before Church authorities for proving or ‘probate’, and were often ‘enrolled’ or copied into registers by the court clerks. Thereafter probate was removed from the Church to the National Court of Probate for England and Wales (Scotland had a separate system). These later wills have become much easier to access since the Government launched its ‘Find a will’ website( probate search. service.
gov.uk), and the majority of Scottish probate records can be accessed via the Scotlands People website ( scotlands
people.gov.uk). Pre-1858 wills for England and Wales, however, have traditionally been trickier to locate. But, with more indexes being published online, there’s never been a better time to start searching.
The opening words of a traditional will – “In the Name of God Amen”, or in Latin “In Dei Nomine Amen” – show the original importance of the religious nature of these documents,
which survive from as early as the 1300s. As a person’s life drew to a close, his or her attention turned to the afterlife, as well as to the disposition of worldly goods to provide for the family and for good deeds, which were seen to benefit the soul. Today a will is a single document, often beginning “This is the last will and testament of…”, but in the Middle Ages there were two separate documents. The testament concerned a person’s goods, while the will itself expressed their wishes as to the disposition of lands. By about 1500 the two documents had merged, and began to be written in English. The Statute of Wills in 1540 enabled landowners to devise their lands by will. Other requirements were also laid down: a will must be in writing, signed by the person whose will it was (the ‘testator’), and must have at least two witnesses and an executor.
For the south of England, the major or ‘higher’ court was the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The records of this court commence in 1384, and continue to 1858. The registers are at The National Archives (TNA) in Kew, and digital copies can be viewed online or individual wills can be downloaded for a small fee (see nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-withyour-research/research-guides/ wills-1384-1858). PCC wills are also
available on ancestry.co.uk and on thegenealogist.co.uk.
It is worth remembering that the wills appearing in will registers are always copies, with the possibility of errors creeping in occasionally despite the best efforts of the clerks concerned. The PCC retained many original wills, including those of famous people such as William Shakespeare. Dated 1616, this can be downloaded for free from TNA’s website at discovery. nationalarchives.gov.uk/ details/r/C198022.
In theory the PCC was for wills involving property in more than one diocese, which is a district under the care of a bishop. In the north of England the Prerogative Court of York covered the dioceses of Chester, Carlisle, Durham and York. The records of this are held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives ( york.ac.uk/borthwick), although the indexes (covering 1688–1858) are on Findmypast at bit.ly/fmp-pcc-york.
Where property was all in one diocese, the will could be proved locally in a ‘lower’ court. Over time the PCC came to be regarded as more prestigious and perhaps more reliable than local courts. Therefore many wills that could have been proved locally are actually found in the PCC. You may also find a man’s will in the PCC, but his widow’s in a local court.
Civil authority
During the Commonwealth after the Civil Wars, from 1653 to 1660 probate for England and Wales was transferred to a civil court: the ‘Judges for the Probate of Wills and granting Administrations’. The records are among those of the PCC. In this period English briefly replaced Latin for legal documents. This is helpful because the probate, which is the record of the proving of the will recorded at the end of the text, was traditionally in Latin, a practice that resumed in 1660 until 1733 when it was finally abandoned.
If you are struggling with a Latin probate, look at some post-1733 ones to see the typical wording. They begin with the place of proving, name the officials concerned and give the date of probate, although you probably know this already from the index you used in your search. Next they state that it was proved by the oath of the executor named in the will, and say that he has been sworn “duly to administer”. If there are several executors, sometimes only one is sworn initially, with “power reserved” to the others. If the executor is a woman (an ‘executrix’), she may have married since the will was written, or an executor may have died or refused to act, all of which will be recorded in the probate.
The local courts form a complicated network. Each bishop had probate jurisdiction within his diocese. Mostly the records of the bishops’ courts, known as consistory courts, survive in local record offices. The simplest way of finding what exists for the area where your ancestors lived is to access the website of the record office or archives for that area and search for ‘wills’. In the majority of cases you will find detailed explanations and possibly links to guide you to the correct place. For example, Derbyshire Record Office’s website derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/ record-office/records/wills explains that the county was in the diocese of Lichfield, the records of which are held at Staffordshire Record Office. These records have recently been added to Findmypast at bit.ly/fmp-staffs-wills. There is also a free index covering 1620–1780 on staffsnameindexes.
org.uk. Wills proved in the diocese of Durham can be searched at
familyrecords.dur.ac.uk and viewed on familysearch.org. FamilySearch also has a useful map ( familysearch.org/mapp) showing probate jurisdictions for England and Wales in 1851 to help you track down where a will may have been proved.
There were exceptions to the probate jurisdiction exercised by bishops, called ‘peculiars’. In these, jurisdiction was exercised by other bodies such as the Crown, the dean and chapter of a cathedral or a manorial lord. Where the records of these courts survive, you will find them mentioned in the catalogue or on the website of the relevant archive.
Other probate documents
The court records sometimes contain other types of documents besides the written will. Sometimes those attending a dying person would enquire about their last wishes and later recount them to the court, where they were recorded as a ‘memorandum’ of a spoken (‘nuncupative’) will. These have a unique charm in giving the actual words spoken. For example, in 1601 a young apprentice soap-maker, from Devon, lay dying in Bristol. His master had already died, so he was now apprenticed to the man’s widow, who was caring for him as his employer and mistress. She asked what he would give her out of his goods in recompense for her painstaking attentions. He replied, “You have no need of anything that I have for you are rich enough”, and went on to leave his total worldly wealth of £10 to his unmarried sisters.
Sometimes probate inventories have survived, listing the deceased’s possessions and their value. Gloucestershire probate documents have recently been digitised and are available on Ancestry ( bit.ly/anc
glos-wills). The collection includes inventories, where they have survived. These may relate to someone who left a will, or to cases where ‘Letters of Administration’ were granted because someone died without making one (‘intestate’). The main interest of inventories lies in revealing details of the deceased’s household and possessions – pots, pans and bed linen, as well as cows and sheep – but occasionally a list of debts owed to the deceased, usually given towards the end of the document, may refer to family members. For example, Edward Cooke, a haberdasher of Bristol in 1687, was owed £4 by his brother Thomas Cook, as well as over £90 from some 70 named debtors, some marked “gone” or “dead”. Note that inventories do not take account of the value of lands, other than those held on lease, so provide only a partial picture of the deceased’s wealth.
When Henry Barrow, a butcher from Gloucestershire, died in 1777, his two sons were too young to administer his estate, so the court appointed guardians for them. This documentation (available in the Gloucestershire collection on Ancestry) provides the ages of the children: Richard was nine years old, while Thomas was 13 years old. The only other document relating to their father in the court records is his probate inventory (also on Ancestry). However, these documents do not appear together, so a separate search is required to find the children’s guardianship record (sometimes also called a ‘tutorship’).
The documentation relating to a ‘Letter of Administration’, often abbreviated to ‘admon’, is usually an administration bond (see example, opposite). The first part of this is in Latin (before 1733) and the remainder in English; it is very often written onto a printed form, so much of the wording is standard. Some websites providing images of probate documents do not distinguish between wills and admons, so it can be disappointing to find that an item described as a will is actually the much less informative administration bond.
Tracking down a will
The growth in online indexing is making life much easier for family historians, but there are a few points to bear in mind. Spelling of surnames varied considerably in the past, the more so as you travel further back in time. Some indexes bring together spelling variants. For example, Gloucestershire Archives’ online Genealogical Database at ww3. gloucestershire.gov.uk/genealogy/ search.aspx does, but the index of PCC wills on Ancestry at bit.ly/ancpcc-wills does not – so you will
need to search for each variant. With wills from Tudor times or before, difficult handwriting has sometimes misled indexers on genealogical websites. Try searching TNA’s Discovery catalogue instead ( discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk) by typing in the name you are looking for followed by ‘probate’.
Another solution is to see if a list of old wills for the county you are interested in has been published. Many lists of old wills or abstracts of their contents were published in around 1900 by antiquarians and record societies. They were once only available in specialist libraries, but many of these volumes can now be downloaded for free from archive.org, including PCC wills going back to 1559.
Supplementary documents
Sometimes a will is accompanied by supplementary documents; make sure you do not overlook these. The PCC will of John Seymour of Bitton, Gloucestershire, proved 1709, appears to be followed by another will which is in fact a codicil (postscript), followed by an idiosyncratically spelled letter written from Maryland where he was governor when he died: “Sir… I am obliged to acquaint you with the loss of your dear father… who after several months languishing of a great cold and intromitting feavour dyed on Satturday the 30th of July… and was buried on Friday following in St. Anns Church.”
Sometimes the executor did not fully settle the estate, which came to light a generation or so later when a further grant had to be made. With PCC wills, the whole story is crammed into the margin in small writing. This can be daunting to interpret, but should never be overlooked. Richard Orlebar, a Bedfordshire gentleman, wrote his will in 1729, and it was proved in 1733. His executor was his cousin John Orlebar, a lawyer of the Middle Temple in London, who failed to settle all of Richard’s affairs. This was discovered 70 years later, in 1803. John’s own will had appointed three executors, but two died before John and the third one declined the task. So probate “with the will annexed” was granted to John’s son Richard, who had to conclude the 1733 probate as an “administrator with the will annexed”; since he had not been named as such in the will, he could not be an executor.
Not only the wealthy
It is often thought that those with little to leave did not make wills, but records of the Bristol Probate Court in the 1600s and 1700s show many people, often mariners, leaving wills with goods worth under £10. Sometimes people were unaware of the value of their estate: as Agnes Mason, a baker’s widow, lay dying in Bristol in December 1599, she was urged to make her will. She answered, “I have nothing”, but she was reminded that her husband, who had died a few weeks before, had made her his full executrix. When Agnes was asked who she wanted to be executor, “Straight way she put her hand forth and took her cousin Ann Clovyll by the hand and said ‘Ann’.” This was a nuncupative will recorded later from the statements of witnesses. Note that the wills of more affluent members of society sometimes mention servants. Sir Samuel Astry, a London lawyer, in 1704 left annuities to several named servants: William Price, Richard Goodlad, Ralph Young, Mrs Sarah Granger and to Anne Hales “in regard she is lame having been hurt in my service”. Even quite modest households had live-in servants, and you will often find them named. Study the local history of the area where you ancestors lived to see if there is a big house where they might have been employed. Information from wills can also be used to augment the sparse details provided by early parish registers. In 1678 William Martin, a Bristol cooper, married Anne Keer of Newland, Gloucestershire, by licence. Marriage registers at this date did not name fathers. Since the surname ‘Keer’ and its variants ‘Kear’ and ‘Keare’ are not
Information from wills can be used to augment the sparse details in early parish registers
common, I made a speculative search of Gloucestershire wills on Ancestry, and discovered that Richard Keare of Newland in 1685 made a bequest to his daughter Anne, the wife of William Martin of the City of Bristol – confirming him as her father.
Family trouble
Wills can give us an insight into troubled relationships within the family. For example, to prove that a person had not been overlooked, testators made a nominal 1s bequest to someone they saw as undeserving. Caleb Evans, schoolmaster, of the parish of St James in Bristol, made his will on 31 August 1787: “I Give and Bequeath unto my Stubborn and Disobedient Wife Mary One Shilling and no more… Item I give unto my son Caleb of Pontypool Malster One Shilling and no more for his disobedient behaviour.”
Bequests could also be used to attempt to control the behaviour of relatives from beyond the grave. For example, in 1704 Sir Samuel Astry set aside £6,000 as a dowry for his daughter Diana, provided the match met with the approval of his widow “declared in writing” – otherwise she would only receive £1,000.
Also, wills can sometimes be the only evidence of parentage if a father leaves a bequest to help support an illegitimate child, while women’s wills are often good at naming many relatives. Mary Bowring of Dinnington in Somerset made her will, as a married woman, in 1840, saying she was the widow of Richard Cannicott of Donyatt, yeoman, before marrying John Bowring. She made bequests to her brothers and sisters, as well as other named relatives.
Finally, significant time may elapse between writing a will and probate. Mariners often wrote wills before a voyage, only to return home safely. Always look carefully at the dates, because major family events might have intervened, such as the birth of a further child or the death of a beneficiary. As ever when searching records, close attention to detail is vital.