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Where To Look For English Ancestor’s Wills

You may be wondering where to go looking for your ancestor’s will.
The first thing that you need to consider is that before 1858, England and Wales were divided up into two provinces.

Canterbury was the largest and most influential and its remit covered the South of England up to the Midlands along with Wales. The other one was The Province of York, whose area covered the counties of Durham, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Westmorland, Cumberland, Lancashire, Cheshire, Nottinghamshire, and also the Isle of Man.

The structure of these ecclesiastic provinces were that at the head of each was an Archbishop. Then the province was subdivided into several smaller dioceses with each diocese having a minimum of two bishops. A further division was where these dioceses were divided again into archdeaconries.

Until 12 January 1858, all wills had to be “proven” in a church court to ensure that it was considered a legal will. There were, in effect, over 250 church courts across the country that proved wills and the records of these wills are now to be found stored mostly in local record offices.

Where a will was proved would depend upon where the lands the property was situated in. Another important consideration was whether they were contained within a single archdeaconry. If they were then the will would be proven in the Archdeacon’s court. If, however, the property of the deceased was to be found stretching across several archdeaconries, then it would have to be proven in a Bishop’s Court.

In a similar fashion, should the land be in more than one diocese then it would be to the Archbishop’s Prerogative Court that the will would need to go to be proved.

As always, there are the exceptions to the rules and one of these is if the deceased had died abroad. I such a case the will would be proven at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury regardless of where the property was.

Wills proven in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are now held at the National Archives in Kew, while the wills proven in the Prerogative Court of York are to be found at the Bothwick Institute in the University of York.

All of the wills proven in the lower courts up to 1858 are usually held in the Diocesan Record Office and often this will be the County Record Office. In Wales, however, wills from 1521 are held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Family historians can find locating wills to be an up hill task. It is recommended that you try to locate an index before you set off to one archive or another, to see if a will for your forebear exists. Many indexes are now available on CD and online via the subscription sites like TheGenealogist.co.uk and Ancestry.

A will and testament from the 19th century
A Will from the 19th century online
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Family Tree Research is Big Business!

While I was taking a break from researching my family tree I took a look at a finance site this morning. My attention was drawn, because of my interest in Family History, towards a report on Investors.com about a stock that’s been one of the market’s big winners during the past year and a half in the USA.

Read more at:http://www.investors.com/Education/DailyStockAnalysis.aspx?id=576677

It is, of course, Ancestry.com Inc. the group of family history web sites, including Ancestry.co.uk, that many of us use or have probably used in the past to dig into our family tree and dig up things like births, marriages and deaths, census record and more. It became listed in November 2009 and so it is considered to be relatively new to the market.

But already Investors.com reveals that:

” … a lot of people seem to be interested in that information. Sales growth ranged from 36% to 41% during the past four quarters.
* Earnings growth has had some big swings, but came in at a hefty 125% last quarter.
* Looking ahead, analysts see earnings rising 51% this year and 30% next year.
* The stock’s Relative Strength Rating is 96. That rating compares Ancestry’s price performance to the rest of the market. So Ancestry is outperforming 96% of the other stocks in the market.
* Still, its Accumulation/Distribution Rating is a D-. So some big investors have been selling the stock.”

All this shows that, across the world, people like us are so taken by the Family History bug that we are willing to spend money in the pursuit of our hobby.

Now I know, from feed back on my blog and on my facebook page, that some people believe that the subscriptions to sites like these are getting out of their reach. It would seem that the Israeli owned MyHeritage may have understood this trend in the market as it is reported on another website I found called Businessinsider.com, that they are developing a way to share the costs of subscriptions to their site.

MyHeritage, which makes it money from advertising as well as premium subscriptions has a quite clever way of getting family history researchers to pay for premium subscriptions to its site and that is to encourage your friends and family to chip in.

According to Business Insider:

“You can create a “Family Goal” to encourage other family members to subscribe.

This has some precedent, in different ways, in online fundraising campaigns, which encourage donors to reach a goal, and in group buying. Obviously it makes sense in a genealogy site, where a family may be involved in matching their heritage, but it can also make sense for any site that is used by a group (for example a group publishing platform).

It’s a clever mechanic, and it will be interesting to see whether it works for MyHeritage and whether other social sites implement something similar.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/myheritage-social-payments-2011-7#ixzz1RyYprp7U

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Well Worth Family Historians Looking For A Will

A will and testament from the 19th century
A Will from the 19th century

It was not just the rich who would leave a will in the Britain of the past. For this reason, family historians looking into their family tree, should consider it worth researching whether their ancestor did so. This area of family history research is often recorded as Wills and Administrations. I will write about Administrations in another post concentrating today on Wills.

Technically what we refer to in common speech as a ‘will’ is in fact a joint deed that is legally known as ‘The Last Will and Testament’ of the person who has died and it was in 1540 that in England it came into existence. From that date on a party could now devise, or gift, their ‘Freehold’ land by the means of a will.

In order for a deceased’s wishes to be carried out an executor, or executrix, would need to be appointed by the departed to administer and distribute their estate after their death. The executor/executrix would need to apply to a court for the will to be carried out and that court would have to be satisfied the will was valid and that it was the deceased’s final will, and testament. This is the process known as “proving a will”. When satisfied the court then issues a grant of probate that allowed the executors to finally carry out the will’s terms and distribute the deceased’s property.

Before 1540, in England, a testament was only concerned with what is known as “personality” or personal property, which is a person’s moveable goods and chattels. This was because a person’s interests in any “real property” (that is the land and any buildings that they owned) would automatically descended  to the
deceased’s immediate heir, normally the first son. Ecclesiastical law, however, held that at least one-third of a man’s property should pass to his widow as her dower and then another one-third should go to all his children.

As you delve into this area of family history you may possibly come across something called a nuncupative will, or perhaps you will see it referred to as an oral will. If you consider that in some places, in years gone by, very few people other than the clergy could read and write. So if your ancestor was dying, with no one available with the skill to write down his wishes, then the court may have relied on the deceased’s oral declaration of their last wishes to another party. Probate would only be granted after the courts had listened to the sworn evidence of those persons who had heard that declaration being made.

As I am sure we can all imagine, this sort of will would often lead to disputes. Needless to say nuncupative wills were made invalid in England by the Wills Act of 1837. There being one exception, however, and that is in the case of members of the armed forces on active duty, for whom they are still legal today.

You can tell such wills apart in the records, as they can usually be identified because they start with the word: Memorandum.

A holographic will, on the other hand, is a will and testament that has been entirely handwritten and signed by the testator. In the United Kingdom, unwitnessed holographic wills remained valid in Scotland up until the Requirements of Writing Scotland Act 1995. This Act of Parliament abolished the provision and so such wills written after 1st August 1995 are now invalid in all of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Family historians, may well find that the ancestor that they though would just not have written a will, may well have done so. Consider that even if your ancestor was not wealthy, but a person who owned the tools of a trade, then they may well have wanted to make sure that these were passed on to the right person.

Another lesson that I have learnt is that finding wills can be difficult. I had searched many times, over the years, in various online places before I found the probate for my 2x great-grandfather on the recently available Ancestry Wills & Probate data.

Henry Thomas Thorne, for forty years worked on the River Dart first as the steersman of the railway ferry the Perseverance and then as captain of the GWR Steamer The Dolphin making the short crossing between Kingswear and Dartmouth. He died in 1908 and left effects of £202 17 shillings. That’s about £15,700.00 now, using the retail price index.

As with all family history research, don’t give up on blanks in your family tree, simply resolve to return to unfruitful searches at regular intervals as more data becomes available all the time.

The Nosey Genealogist.

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New Resource For Jersey Family History

I have had my attention drawn to a new resource for Jersey family historians by James McLaren from the CIFHS. He has pointed out that there is now a copy of the Victoria College entry register 1852-1929 on the web, courtesy of Old Victorian, Tony Bellows.

Although the format is a little awkward – the text is sideways on – the 4 files can be downloaded as .pdfs and by rotating them, someone doing research for ancestors that attended this island  school, will find them usable.

Well worth a look if you head over to:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/58994780/Victoria-College-Register-1852-1929-Pages-1-100Victoria College Jersey by Tony Bellows

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How Can I Find Parish Records In My Family Tree Research?

Online-Old-Parish-RecordsMost people researching their family tree in the British Isles will eventually get past the census collections and the civil registrations and must now turn to the Parish records to proceed further. While, recently, there has been a great many more parish register collections being made available through the subscription sites, it is still not the case that a family historian will definitely find their ancestors parish has been uploaded online. Getting back before 1837 in England & Wales needs researchers to know where to look for the relevant details

Even if, however, we accept that we may need to make a visit to a physical archive, in order to push our research on, then we can certainly turn to the internet in order to locate where the parish records are. As well as this the web can undoubtedly save our selves time, when we do make the visit to the particular County Record Office or other archive, by being able to gain information provided by their website beforehand. In some cases they may even have their catalogue online which would allow us to do essential homework such as finding call numbers for the documents that we wish to look at and perhaps even ordering them up before we arrive.

In most cases, probably as much as ninety-nine percent of the time, we will find that the Parish Records for our ancestors have by now been deposited at the County Record Office, while a rare few will still be at the church in the care of the incumbent minister.

So where should we look first online?

A good starting point is to head over to the ARCHON page that is to be found in the website of The National Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk and is a list of all sorts of archives in the country. The lists include diocesan archives, regimental and many other depositories that have a bearing on social history and genealogy.

From the National Achives home page navigate to the Records page and then to Catalogues and Online Records scroll down until you see the link for Archon. you will now be given a list of areas in Britain to search each with its own link so we see North East, North West etc. Selecting the area that you wish to look up will take you to an A-Z of repositories and if you were looking for a county record office this will be listed there.

Click on the relevant list and you will now be shown the information that ARCHON has on the archive in question giving you opening times etc and a very useful link to the actual archive’s website. I say useful because this is where you are likely to find the most up-to-date information about when they are open, if they have any late nights or Saturday opening times and how to get to them by road, rail, or air.

The actual repository’s website will give you such information as to what types of ID they accept, whether they are a member of the CARN ticket scheme where with one card you can gain access to many Record Offices across the country. Also the low down on whether you need to book a microfiche reader in advance of your arrival etc.

Some archive’s even include their catalogue online, this being a very useful tool as you can find out, in advance of your visit, if they hold the documents that you are looking for and also it allows you to take a note of the “call numbers” for the documents. This will cut down on wasting valuable research time, when you first arrive at the record office and indeed you may be able to order up, in advance, the documents to be waiting for you.

ARCHON is a most useful internet tool for those of us who are thinking about heading to an archive to do some research offline and is one of the ways to go about finding parish records.

I will be looking at others in a future post.

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Family History Data, Should It Be Free?

There seems to be a trait among many family historians who all seem to want information to be available to them at the drop of a hat, for free and provided instantaneously as well.

Now, I’d like to raise an argument that this would seem to  defeat the object of much family history research. Is it not the thrill of carrying out a piece of detective work, in order to find an ancestor after ploughing through the databases online and then visiting the County Record Offices in person to read page after page of parish registers on the microfilm machine, that makes this pastime of ours fun?

Certainly, a good few newcomers to family history seem to believe that all they will need to is log onto the web, enter a name into a search box and they will instantly find their ancestors going back to Adam and Eve. Many do not think that they should pay anything for this, as if the state has some sort of obligation to give them the information on demand.

I don’t know if you have you ever looked into the searches that are carried out on the likes of Google for keywords? Take “family tree” as an example. I’ve noticed that the number of people typing in a search on how to get their family tree for free, was quite high. It would seem that some people express the idea that as its “their family” that they have some sort of right to be given the research.

When most of the newbies, to family history, find that they need to pay for a subscription to a website, in order to progress, they either descend into rudeness, or give up before they even get properly started. This latter scenario being an absolute shame, in my view.

From my website I offer a tips and tricks email which gives the people, who have signed up to my list, valuable free content. At the bottom of the email I often have an advertisement for my paid for products and it amazes me that I get aggressive emails back saying things such as “I’m not made of money you know”. To these people I would just like to humbly suggest that they enjoy the 98% of the rest of the email, that comprises the free tip, and just try to ignore the advertisement for my products at the bottom.  Do they have such a problem with commercial television, I wonder?

Expanding the discussion a little bit more, I’d like to bring in the arguments of the Open Genealogy Alliance – http://www.opengenalliance.org/

As I understand it, they are arguing that our public records should be made free to view online. They make the point that, in a large number of cases, many public records have now been licensed to private companies. These business need to make a return on their investment and so the public can only gain access to the data if they pay for it. The OGA are challenging this idea, saying that the digital versions of, what are, public records are effectively being privatised.

In my opinion there certainly needs to be some sort of balance, the record offices and archives are all facing up to the shortage of funds in the present economic climate and perhaps we should all make a bit of an effort to go out there, whenever possible, and visit the various archives more often. A vicious circle where they many have to cut their hours, due to less visitors coming to see them and reacting to spending cuts could see the record offices and archives closed or amalgamated.

Until absolutely every record is available online, a situation that is never likely to happen, then we family historians should stop expecting instant records to be available to us at our finger tips. And, what is more, I do think that we need to get out of depending only on our computer and just go out there into the world to find the information for ourselves. Believe me, it really is much more fun that way!

What do you think?

The National Archives at Kew
The National Archives at Kew
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More Parish Records Online for Family Historians

I am spending a lot more time trying to find Parish Records these days and it is refreshing to see that more are making it onto the internet.

Take, for example, the two major sets of records that consist of data for generations of residents of Liverpool that Ancestry.co.uk released in April of this year. Three million Roman Catholic and Church of England baptism, marriage and burial records, fully searchable is a fantastic resource for those family historians researching in this major English city.

The Liverpool Catholic Registers, 1750–1900, span 150 years  and contain 1.6 million Catholic baptism, marriage and burial records. These will be of particular interest to the 136,0002 Liverpudlians today of Irish descent.

The 1.8 million Liverpool Church of England Parish Registers, 1659–1974, will equally be a significant resource for those tracing ancestors from the Protestant community of Liverpool. When one has got back before 1837 and the time when Civil Registration came in, these Parish Registers are the best way to find births, marriages and death records. No doubt this data set will really help people to trace their northern ancestors back to the 17th century.

The records, contained within these two particular collections, span over four centuries and witness the development of Liverpool from little more than a small town in the 1600s, to one of the UK’s largest and most culturally diverse cities.

It was during the 17th and 18th centuries that Liverpool’s population steadily grew. Come the 19th century, Liverpool expanded to become the second port of Britain and also one of the major centres for the trading of cotton, the importation of food and raw materials, the exportation of manufactured goods, coal, the insurance industry, banking and, of course, shipping.

The release of a database for a city such as Liverpool, with its many parishes, will allow family historians to search many parish records at once, a valuable time saver. The fact that people will be able to see digital copies of the original records is also another significant plus point for this Parish Records release on the internet. Not having to rely on transcriptions is a real bonus for researchers. Looking forward to more such releases in the future.

Tony Tutorial 468x60

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Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers

So, you have been researching your ancestors through the census and have gleaned the name of the town that they were born in. You now have to find the parish in which your ancestor was baptised in and perhaps you have been lucky in getting the parish name from the census. Now you want to find out where exactly it is and carry on your research back before 1837.

The Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers

The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, Phillimore & Co Ltd; 3rd Revised edition edition (1 Dec 2002) is the go to resource for family historians who are dealing with the “Old Parishes” of England, Scotland & Wales. The third edition of this index features the addition of a map of the whole UK that shows the county boundaries before 1830 and it has shifted to a reliance on census indexes, rather than marriage indexes, which are now summarized in a paragraph.

 

In what I’ve written above I refer to the Old Parishes. What are these, you may be asking yourself? The answer is that they are those, approximately twelve and a half thousand parishes, from before 1832 and the Victorian expansion of towns and cities. It was then that many of the ancient parishes were divided up with the building of new churches to cater for the expanding population.

 

The Phillimore Atlas and Index is an abstract made in 1831 of the records that had survived for the parishes of that time. The book gives the family historian maps of the ancient parishes, along with names and the dates of the earliest surviving registers for each of the named parishes. Now these could be back as far as 1538 or much much later, depending on their survival against fire, flood and a variety of other reasons for them going missing.

 

Taking a look at the Index section you would see that you are able to find a list of the old parishes for the county that you are interested in. You will find the dates for when the registers were deposited and a code against them that will tell you where the records are deposited in the various record offices.

 

Now, you should be aware, however, that it is possible that not all three types of records may have been deposited yet. The baptism, marriage and burial registers may have filled up at different rates. The registers are only ever deposited when they are full as they remain a working document until such time. So, take as an example, a parish where baptisms are only done once in a blue moon. Here the register that they started in 1813 may still be with the church as it tortuously slowly received children into the faith! (1813 was when the new registers came into existence.)

 

The Atlas and Index is effectively a synopsis of parish registers and if there is nothing in the column for baptisms then you could assume that it was still with the church in 2003, when the last revision came out. The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, can be found in most municipal libraries or can be bought from all good bookshops and at Amazon.co.uk

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Another Good Reason for Joining the Society of Genealogists

I got an email today as I’m a member of the Society of Genealogists. It gave me the good news about some of the new records that have recently been added to SoG Data Online and which can be accessed free of charge from home by members of the Society.

The first is: “The Apprentices of Great Britain records” which list apprentices from all over the country between 1710 and 1773, and even some from 1773-1811.

If you have London ancestry back in the 17th and 18th centuries then the next data set that is available via this site and could be of great use top you is the “Boyds London Inhabitants”.

Thirdly the “Teachers Registration Council registers” will be of use to those with teachers in their family tree. Although the latter commence in 1914, they include teachers who started their careers from 1870-1948. Over 100,000 people are listed, more than half of them being women.

Next is “The Trinity House Calendars” which gives details of a number of merchant seamen and their families. The petitions for assistance from the wives/widows of seamen who have either been injured or have died are full of biographical detail.

There are now nearly 10 million records on SoG Data Online. To access them you need to be a member of the Society of Genealogists and then you can login via the MySoG link.

www.sog.org.uk

Society of Genealogists.

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