Find a Will service | English Ancestors

Oh my goodness! What have they done to the online GRO Find a Will service?!

I haven’t had reason to order a post-1858 Will for ages, so I didn’t know about the changes until I saw the video below. But before moving on to that, in case all this is new to you here’s a bit of introductory information about Wills.

Before 1858 Wills were dealt with by the Church courts – finding them can be a challenge because there was a whole hierarchy of courts; and where your ancestor’s Will was proved depended on where they lived, where they held land, the value of their estate and a number of other factors. That’s a topic for another post.

After 1858 Wills came under the jurisdiction of civil probate courts: one Principal Probate Registry, a number of local Probate Registries and a single, central index which is available online and is searchable. In other words, if your ancestor died in or after 1858 and had something to leave to their descendants, their Will or Administration papers will be much easier to find. These are the Wills we’re talking about here.

The central index is known as the National Probate Calendar. Often, seeing that will give you all the information you need. For example, the entry for my GG grandmother’s second husband provides his full name, his address, his occupation, the date of death, the regional Probate Registry where probate was granted, the names of two men to whom it was granted, and the value of his effects.

That’s a lot of information, and it may already fill some gaps for you. It will certainly enable you to narrow down the entries and be sure you have the right person. However, particularly when you’re at the fairly early stages of your research and trying to keep costs down, you may be happy just to leave it at that.

Before we move on, there are a couple of notes about these entries:
First, the National Probate Calendar arranges information according to the year probate was granted, not the year of death. This is particularly important to note because when you watch the video you’ll see the online search asks you for the year of death and limits the search to that one year. You can start with that, but always be prepared to move forwards a year (or maybe more) if the person you’re looking for doesn’t show. In my example above this person died on 11th December 1898, but probate was not granted until 26th January of 1899. 1899, then, is the year under which he’s to be found.

Second, the people named (the people to whom probate is granted) are not necessarily the people who are inheriting. They are the executors (or administrators). They may be the same people as those inheriting, but may not. In the example above, the two men named as executors were just that. One was the deceased’s wife’s stepbrother; I’m not able to place the other. Again, even without sight of the will this gives me some interesting information: I know from other documents that the actual stepfather was abusive; I have no idea where he went after the 1861 census, but I know he was not living with his wife, my GGG grandmother. And yet here is evidence that his son from a former marriage maintained a kinship relationship with his stepsister, my GG grandmother.

If you have an Ancestry subscription you can see the National Probate Calendar with the full entry, including all the information above, and you can link it to your person’s profile. The record set is England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995

However, you can also see it using the government’s own Find a Will service, and if you want to order a copy of the Will, this is where you need to go. The cost of ordering is just £1.50. For this you get digital images of all the pages. Before ordering, please note that if your ancestor died intestate – that is, if he or she didn’t make a Will – this will be recorded on the entry as ‘Letters of Administration’ rather than ‘The Will’ (or sometimes just ‘Administration’ as opposed to ‘Probate’). If that is the case, obviously there is no Will to see, but the Letters of Administration will still give names of the administrators and those who will inherit.

So… if all this is new to you, I hope that has got you up to speed.

The GRO Find a Will website search facility has recently been changed, and it’s currently rather clunky! I’m going to hand you over to Dave Annal who has prepared a short video (8 minutes 57 seconds) that shows how he overcame the changes. I hope you find it useful – and that you find some ancestors’ Wills.

I’ve talked before about the government’s online Find a Will service.

Well… Big News! The cost of using this service has been massively reduced. Instead of £10 per Will, the cost is now £1.50.

I don’t know about you, but that makes a huge difference to me. I’m normally very careful about buying Wills and BMD certificates, only buying when I know it will give me information that will help me to progress in some way. But at £1.50 per Will, I can justify buying ones that have merely piqued my curiosity. I don’t know if this reduced price will be permanent, but if you can, it makes sense to go through your ancestors and see if there’s a Will or two you need. I’ve ordered eight.

Why might you need a Will?
It’s not about being nosy and seeing how much money and property they left – although of course that information will tell you a lot about the kind of lifestyle your ancestor might have enjoyed. But in fact a Will can tell us a great deal about family networks. There might be a child you hadn’t known about, or perhaps a complicated family network following divorce or separation. There could be a share of the inheritance to a child who seemed to you to have fallen off the radar. Prior to the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, fathers might have made arrangements for their daughters, to avoid all the inheritance falling into the hands of an unknown future husband. In other words, a Will might give us a lot of useful information.

Some tips on using the service
The online Find a Will service deals only with probate from 1858 to the present day. You have to search in one of three categories:

Wills and Probate 1996 to present
Wills and Probate 1858-1996
Soldier’s Wills – these will usually only be on here if the person was killed in action. However, some of them have been lost.

Make sure you have the correct section highlighted before you enter your search terms.

Screen grab from UK government's Find a Will website search page

Although the search field asks for year of death, the information is in fact arranged by year of Probate, i.e. the year the Probate documents were finalised. This could be the year after death, or in some cases several years after death. So remember to search the following year or two if you can’t find your ancestor in the year they actually died.

If you find your ancestor you’ll see a short statement of who he or she is, where they lived, when they died, when and where Probate was granted and the names of Executors. This will help you to identify the correct deceased person, and you will also need some of this information to be able to order the documents.

Bear in mind that the Executors are not necessarily the beneficiaries, so the people listed on this note are not the full story. For that, you do need to buy the Will and Probate documents. For example, I’ve just ordered the Will below. I expect William Cass, son, and William Wade, son-in-law, to inherit, but not Edwin Wade, who is the very able older brother of William Wade but not directly related to the deceased.

After you’ve entered the search terms, sometimes Irish and Scottish records come up before the English ones start. Sometimes, too, you might find your ancestor listed on a page headed ‘Administrations’ rather than ‘Probate’. This means your ancestor didn’t leave a Will: they died ‘intestate’. If your ancestor died intestate but still had property of value to pass on, the courts would appoint an administrator to deal with the estate. In other words, it would be dealt with via Administration rather than Probate. There will still be documents relating to the sharing out of the inheritance, but there won’t be a personal statement from the deceased relating to how they want their property to be shared.

Finally – you’ve found your ancestor, you’ve ordered your documents and you’ve paid your £1.50 per Will. What a bargain! So what next? You’ll receive a link by email within a week or two, which will take you to images of the original documents. You will have 31 days to download your copy of each will.

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