Getting to grips with WILLS (for England & Wales)
Improve your family history search skills with the Family Tree Academy. This issue, David Annal demonstrates how to locate your ancestors' wills, concentrating on England and Wales, and shows why they are such valuable documents to track down
Working with wills
WAs we begin 2021, the Family Tree Academy will be there to help you grow your genealogy skills.
As ever, the aim will continue to be to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step ills are a family historian’s dream, providing a snapshot of a family at a particular moment in time. Together with a whole host of closely-associated, interlinked probate records, they represent an essential tool in our genealogical workshop.
What details will you find in wills?
The documents are packed full of names; beneficiaries, executors, overseers and witnesses.
These are the names of our ancestors’ wives or husbands, children, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, as well as their friends and neighbours. up your family history research.
In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal discusses wills and their usefulness for research in England and Wales.
TIP! Watch out for the terminology When it comes to more distant relatives we need to be a bit careful. The word ‘cousin’ was often used simply to mean a relative of some sort, and the use of the term ‘in-law’ (brother-in-law, daughter-inlaw etc.) can lead to some confusion as it was routinely used where we would say ‘stepdaughter’ etc.
A rich source of placenames
But it’s not just about personal names; wills are also a rich source of placenames – the houses and pieces of land being left to relatives – and, particularly in women’s wills, the personal possessions – the jewellery, clothing and other trinkets bequeathed to favoured nieces and granddaughters. It’s all genealogical gold dust!
Handwriting advice
The handwriting can prove to be a bit of an obstacle but perseverance is the answer. The more you read old wills, the better you will get at it. There are some useful online guides to reading old handwriting; I would particularly recommend The National Archives’ Palaeography Tutorial www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography
Pre-1858 & 1858 onwards
In order to access the documents and to understand how to get the most out of
them, we need to divide the story into two parts; pre- and post-1858.
On Saturday 10 January 1858, the business of the Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York, along with that of the other ecclesiastical probate courts, was formally and officially wound up. Two days later, on the morning of Monday 12 January, a new civil system was introduced; it was a more efficient, streamlined system, better equipped to handle the needs of the modern, Victorian world.
How to find a will from 1858 & later
From 1858 onwards, locating an ancestor’s will is (usually) quite easy, particularly now that we have online access to the indexes. The system that was established in that year was operated through a network of local, district probate registries but the records of the wills proved in these registries were brought together and listed in annual volumes (known as calendars).
• Finding & using will calendars The calendars, particularly in the early years, provide a wealth of detail, making identification of a particular testator a relatively straightforward process. The vast majority of wills are proved within a few months of the testator’s death but, occasionally, a more complex estate can take several years to sort out. Our 21st century databases allow us to search the records by our ancestors’ dates of death, so the issue of delayed probate is no longer an obstacle in our path.
The calendars are easily searchable on the major genealogical websites but there’s also an official government site, operated by the Court Service, which allows users to search the records and to order copies of the full wills for a nominal fee of £1.50 per will.
How to find a will before 1858
The situation before 1858 is more complicated in just about every way. The documents, created by around 200 ancient ecclesiastical probate courts, are held in record offices all around the country. Each court operated its own system of recordkeeping and had its own standards for looking after the records in its care. Horror stories of what can only be called ‘document abuse’ abound, and it sometimes seems like a miracle that anything survives at all from some of the courts.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty from the researcher’s point of view is that there is no central index to our pre-1858 probate records. Searching the records for a will of one of our ancestors can therefore be a real challenge.
• Understanding the pre-1858 system The first step towards understanding how to locate a will pre-1858 is to get to grips with the hierarchical system behind it all.
Probate (the act of proving a will – i.e. giving it legal status) is intrinsically connected with the organisation of the established Church of England. The Church operated a three-tier system:
• At the top of the three tiers were the Prerogative courts, covering the two great ‘Provinces’ of Canterbury and York.
• Underneath them, came the Bishops’ or Consistory courts, 22 of them in
England and 4 in Wales from the Reformation until the early 19th century, each one covering a particular Diocese. • At the next level down are the Archdeaconry courts, many of them roughly aligned with our ancient counties.
• Minor courts aka ‘peculiars’ If it were just about this three-tier hierarchy, it would be complex enough, but we also have to get to grips with a whole host of minor courts, known as ‘peculiars’, most of which had jurisdiction over a very small area, sometimes just a handful of parishes. Some Manorial and Borough courts also had the right to grant probate and there was even a Court of the Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Which court do you need?
Where your ancestor’s will was proved, and therefore where you might expect to find a copy of the will today, is dependent on three main factors:
• when they died.
• where they lived.
• and whether they owned or had an interest in any property elsewhere.
In theory, anyone who owned property in more than one archdeaconry would have their will proved in the relevant Diocesan court and, if they owned property in more than one diocese, their will would be proved in the appropriate Prerogative Court. The Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC), as the country’s senior probate court was also responsible for the wills of people who owned property in both provinces and for those who owned property in England and Wales but lived overseas.
Did they have anything worth leaving?
We also need to consider issues of wealth and gender. In simple terms, our ancestors were more likely to have left a will if they had something worth leaving, and, as a rule, you won’t generally find wills for married women prior to the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. Having said that, wills of spinsters and widows are more common than you might think, representing something like 20% of all wills proved.
Take a three-pronged approach
In order to carry out a thorough search for an ancestor’s will you should expect, in most cases, to have to search the records of three probate courts, one at each of the three levels mentioned above. So we need to know something about the ecclesiastical administrative units that governed our ancestors’ lives.
Finding the courts you need
The best way to find out which ecclesiastical units a particular parish belonged to is to use the Familysearch England Jurisdictions 1851 website
www.familysearch.org/mapp
• An example We’ll take the parish of Shenfield in Essex as an example. The entry for Shenfield (see below left) tells us that the probate court at the lowest level was the Archdeaconry Court of Essex and that the parish was in the Diocese of London and the Province of Canterbury. Wills of inhabitants of Shenfield will be therefore found amongst the records of:
• the Archdeaconry Court of Essex
• the Consistory Court of London
• the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.
Where to locate the records
The next question we need to consider is where to find the records and the best option is to turn to an essential book called Probate Jurisdictions: Where To Look For Wills which lists, countyby-county, the probate courts with jurisdiction in each county, tells you what records exist and which record office holds the originals. The latest (sixth) edition also includes details of online coverage although, as it was published in 2016, it’s already going to be slightly out of date in this respect.
TIP! Search key websites’ & archives You can also try searching Ancestry’s Card Catalogue and the All Record Sets link on Findmypast to see what’s available on those sites. Use the words ‘probate’ or ‘wills’ combined with the county that you’re interested in. And don’t forget the catalogues of the archives themselves. Many of our county record offices have indexed their entire collection of wills.
Online coverage of probate records is now very good – it’s by no means comprehensive but for most courts there is now some material online even if it’s just an index rather than a full-blown database with links to digital images of the documents themselves.
Wills from the PCC & PCY
Wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) are fully indexed and available online through The National
Archives’ Discovery catalogue. Downloads are currently free but in NON-COVID times the cost is £3.50 per will. The full PCC collection is also available to users of Ancestry and Thegenealogist websites while indexes to wills proved in the Prerogative Court of York are available on Findmypast.
About the records of the probate courts
As a general rule, the records of the probate courts should include two copies of each will; the original will (the one brought into the court by the executors) and the registered copy (an exact copy of the original, entered into the court’s registers by professional clerks, employed by the court).
In summary
You never know what you’re going to find in a will but you’ll rarely be disappointed and occasionally you’ll find some entirely unexpected detail which leads you off on a whole new genealogical adventure and helps you to smash down your brick wall. One of the best things about wills is that, unlike most of the other sources we use in our research, they were created by our ancestors themselves. The actual document may have been written by a solicitor but it’s our ancestors’ words that we’re reading and we can often hear their voices echoing down through the centuries.