Why probate records are worth the search

A parish register tells you that an ancestor was baptised, married or buried. A will tells you who they loved, who they had quarrelled with, what they owned, what they owed and who they trusted to carry on after them. Only a minority of our ancestors left a will — before the nineteenth century perhaps as few as one adult in ten — but where one survives it can answer questions that no baptism entry or census return can touch. For many family historians, probate records are the closest they will ever come to hearing an ancestor speak in their own words.

Finding a will after 1858: the probate calendars

From January 1858, probate in England and Wales became a civil matter, handled by the Principal Probate Registry and its district registries. The great gift of this change is the annual probate calendar: a year-by-year index that gives the name of the deceased, their address, the date and place of death, the value of the estate and, from the later nineteenth century, the names of the executors. Because the calendar records a date of death as well as a place, it is often the quickest route to confirming a death when civil registration indexes fail you.

Search the calendars for several years after the death — grants were sometimes delayed while debts were settled or disputes resolved — and look for second or amended entries. Once you have the calendar reference, a copy of the will itself can be ordered for a modest fee. If the estate was small, the calendar entry may be all that survives; in most other cases the will is there, waiting.

Before 1858: the church courts

Earlier wills were proved in the church courts, and there were more than three hundred of them. The most important were the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, which dealt with estates including property in more than one diocese, and the Prerogative Court of York for the northern province. Beneath them sat the consistory, archdeaconry, peculiar and deanery courts, each with its own patch.

The practical question is always the same: which court would have proved a will for your parish? County record offices hold most local probate collections together with their indexes, while the Canterbury wills are indexed by name, place and occupation and are widely available. Take care, though — the court that proved a will was determined by where the property lay, not simply where the testator died, so a farmer with land in two counties may appear in an unexpected place.

What the documents actually reveal

Read the whole document, not just the list of names at the front. Wills are generous with detail:

• Relationships spelled out in full: "my eldest son Thomas", "my daughter Elizabeth, wife of John Cooper", "my sister Ann".
• Widows, stepchildren, illegitimate children and children of an earlier marriage who are invisible elsewhere.
• Land, leases, livestock, shop stock, tools of a trade and household goods.
• Debts owed and owing, funeral instructions and charitable bequests.
• Executors, overseers and witnesses, who were frequently relatives, in-laws or neighbours — all worth tracing in their own right.
• The testator's signature, or a cross or mark, alongside occupation and abode.

Codicils added later can show a change of heart or a family falling-out, and guardianship clauses sometimes name the person a dying parent trusted above all others. A single will can hand you three generations of a family in one paragraph.

Intestates, inventories and death duty registers

Most people died without making a will, and even then there is useful material. Letters of administration — "admons" — were granted to the next of kin, naming the administrator and stating their relationship, usually widow or eldest son, with a bond value attached. Where an inventory survives, often from before the 1780s, it lists rooms one by one and the goods within them, giving a vivid picture of how an ancestor lived and worked.

Do not overlook death duty registers, kept by the Inland Revenue between 1796 and 1903. They are a superb and still under-used source: entries frequently list every beneficiary, their relationship to the deceased, their address and the sum they received. Where a will has been lost, a death duty register can sometimes reconstruct it.

Practical tips before you dive in

• Search every spelling variant, and try the index by place and occupation as well as surname.
• Note both the date the will was made and the date it was proved — the gap can be decades.
• Remember that married women could rarely make wills before 1882, so look for widows and spinsters instead.
• In Scotland, search the commissary courts for confirmations and inventories; in Ireland, expect gaps, as many probate records were destroyed in 1922, and fall back on indexes and abstracts.
• Copy or transcribe the document while the reference is fresh — the handwriting may be harder to read next month.
• Follow up the witnesses and executors. They are often the relatives you have been hunting for.

Probate records rarely give you the whole story on their own, but they give you the parts nobody else recorded: the affection, the grudges, the debts and the small possessions that made up a life. Fewer than one ancestor in ten left a will — but for those who did, it is often the most human document you will ever find.