In a recent article in Your Family Tree (July 2011) about Probate Records on Ancestry, the main content of the article was all about the special offer of Free Access to the National Probate Calendar (and Andrews Newspaper Cards), which will be running from 30 June to 8 July 2011.
However, they slipped in a little gem:
".....Ancestry.co.uk has a number of pre-1861 probate collections taken at both a national and a local level. It's recently added a brand new set of records for Dorset, plus on 30 June, the team will be adding a similar collection of wills and other probate records for London...."
As it happens, although I specialise in London and the Home Counties research, I also have Dorset ancestors. So when the Dorset wills were launched recently on Ancestry, I had a field day. It really does help enormously to be able to read a Will and put all the different members of family into place. In my case, with Dorset, theWills simply confirmed what I had already found out, because the online Dorset parish records are pretty good anyway.
But for London, I reckon that the new online Wills collection could provide a bit of a breakthrough in certain family histories. I will be blogging again once this dataset is online, but I just thought I'd let you know.
Rosemary Morgan
London Roots Research
However, they slipped in a little gem:
".....Ancestry.co.uk has a number of pre-1861 probate collections taken at both a national and a local level. It's recently added a brand new set of records for Dorset, plus on 30 June, the team will be adding a similar collection of wills and other probate records for London...."
As it happens, although I specialise in London and the Home Counties research, I also have Dorset ancestors. So when the Dorset wills were launched recently on Ancestry, I had a field day. It really does help enormously to be able to read a Will and put all the different members of family into place. In my case, with Dorset, theWills simply confirmed what I had already found out, because the online Dorset parish records are pretty good anyway.
But for London, I reckon that the new online Wills collection could provide a bit of a breakthrough in certain family histories. I will be blogging again once this dataset is online, but I just thought I'd let you know.
Rosemary Morgan
London Roots Research
Music to my ears! I am trying to solve a lot of mysteries in London! Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteSo, how do we access them -- the London wills, I mean?
ReplyDeleteCannuk, Ancestry's London Wills and Probate Collection can be found here:
ReplyDeletehttp://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=1704
Leslie Ann, I do hope you've managed to find some ancestors in this collection. Unfortunately I havn't yet! But I will be blogging about the limitations of this collection soon.
ReplyDelete