Ancestry adds new wills calendar

Family history website adds new index of wills from 1861 to 1941.

Ancestry.co.uk has put a major index to wills online, in what is one of the most important data releases since the 1911 Census.

The England and Wales National Probate Calendar 1861-1941 indexes over six million wills. It’s now available to Ancestry subscribers at www.ancestry.co.uk/probate, though anyone can do a search with a basic results list for free.

Although it doesn’t include actual wills, the index to wills proven by the Probate Registry contains a wealth of useful information for family historians.

You can search entries by name and year of death, with extra fields for location and keywords available to help narrow results down. The results generally include the date when the will was proven, the actual date of death, full name of the deceased, where they died and which registry issued the grant of probate.

The index also reveals the summary value of the individual’s estate, and may also include information about where they lived (if different from place of death), and who their executors were – which of course might include family members. The data includes more than 100,000 people who died in Scotland, and others who died abroad.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 2:37 pm and is filed under New Records, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.