About the National Wills Index

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• What is the National Wills Index?
• The importance of wills
• National Wills Index objectives
• Who are involved in the National Wills Index?
• Would you like to participate?
• What’s available now?
• What’s coming?

The National Wills Index is a collaborative project to create a single, dedicated, online resource for pre-1857 probate material for England & Wales. The National Wills Index (NWI) is a project initiated by Origins.net, who are developing and hosting the online service. Access is via subscription; pay-per-view will be available later. Some indexes will be available free. Most indexes will be linked either to digitised images of original documents or to a hard copy service.

While there are numerous indexes to probate material available in printed form and online, for most researchers the lack of any central source of such indexes is a major hindrance, In many cases, the researcher may simply not know where to look. The NWI is intended to remove this difficulty, and provide a major new resource for the family historian, and for the owners of the original material. After births, marriages & deaths, and census records, wills are the most important source documents for the family history researcher. While not everyone left a will, the vast majority of people will have been mentioned in at least one will. Nearly all wills contain information about family relationships, as well as about places associated with the people mentioned, and - often - rich social information: what people did; what they possessed, what they valued; what they felt about others (you can’t be sued for libel when you’re dead). But there are difficulties with wills.

• Where a will was proved is determined by where the testator had property, and this may be far from where they lived. Given that English wills are stored in dozens of locations all over the country, it is often an almost impossible task to find a will of interest.
• A typical will can contain a dozen or more names, the majority of which will be of related people, but most wills are only indexed by the testator, so you might never be able to find wills which would be of value to you.
• Indexes to wills tell you very little beyond the name of the person, where they were living when the will was made, where and when the will was proved. So you need to be able to see the original, or a transcript of it.

The objectives of the NWI project for the family history researcher include:

• bringing together into a single database many disparate indexes to probate documents
• creating indexes to probate documents where these do not already exist
• making available hard copies of all the indexed probate documents
• creating digitised images of the original documents, with online access
• creating full name and place indexes to probate documents.

The project is a long term one, and involves many different bodies with different skills and resources including archives and repositories who are the custodians of the original documents, organisations and individuals who have indexed and transcribed probate records, and specialists in digitisation and indexing of source records. The scale of the project is such that we expect to continue adding new material for several years. The National Wills Index has sprung from a partnership between the Origins.net and the British Record Society (BRS), to place all of the BRS probate indexes online. Other key participants at present the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU), part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the LDS). The Borthwick Institute for Archives one of England’s largest collections of probate records. Oxfordshire Record Office has recently joined the project, and several other record offices will follow shortly.

Origins.net has been building up a substantial database of online probate material; wills indexes on British Origins already contain several million names. Nearly all of the BRS indexes are already online and the remainder, including indexes as yet unpublished, will be added in 2011. The indexes to all probate documents held at York are also now online.

The British Record Society (BRS) has, over the last 130 years, been creating the largest set of probate indexes available for England: now comprising well over 100 volumes, covering the majority of English probate jurisdictions, most of these indexes until now have been accessible only in printed form. The BRS work continues, and has indexes to tens of thousands of probate documents yet to publish. The BRS and Origins are working together to computerise the unpublished material.

Cliff Webb, the General Editor for the British Record Society, has been a major participant in the creation of indexes to and abstracts of English probate records, both BRS and non-BRS. His series of Surrey Wills abstracts (available on British Origins for over two years), was a major achievement in the transcription of historical records. Cliff has personally created many other important datasets, most of which are available or will become available on British Origins.

FamilySearch, operator of the world’s largest genealogical website, www.familysearch.org, and the owner of the world’s greatest collection of genealogical material, is a key participant in the National Wills Index project. They have already microfilmed the vast majority of English probate documents, and have now started to digitise original probate documents, firstly at Oxfordshire Record Office. (FamilySearch was previously responsible for the digitisation of original Scottish wills for the National Archives of Scotland (over 2 million exposures). Further probate digitisation projects at other archives, working from the source documents, are currently being planned. We expect other probate collections to be digitised from microfilm. It is intended that all these digitised images will become available exclusively on the NWI. Where required, Origins will create new indexes to these images.

The Borthwick Institute, part of the University of York, is one of England’s great archives. It holds the second largest collection of probate documents in England. The indexes to all of these documents have been placed on British Origins, whence researchers can order hard copies online. The Borthwick Institute will shortly be starting to digitise their source documents, and these will become available online on the NWI.

Oxfordshire Record Office holds the original probate documents for Oxfordshire. These are currently being digitised by FamilySearch, and the images will be available later this year on the NWI. The documents have all been indexed by the British Record Society, and these indexes are online on the NWI. A full name index will be created from the digitised images. If you or your organisation is interested in the NWI, contact Ian Galbraith at Origins.net (ian@origins.net) to discuss how you might participate. See here for more details. Indexes covering 90% of English counties are already online. New indexes and abstracts are being added to the NWI every few weeks.
Click here for information on collections currently available. NWI is a major on-going project and new material be added regularly over for several years, and as new members join the project.

Currently there are index records to over 200,000 Irish wills in Origins.net’s Irish Origins database.


More Information for Owners and Custodians of Probate Material
Contact details for other NWI participants