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This site is about old Wills. You will find transcripts of the Wills and links to the original documents if they are freely available on-line. The people are, for the most part, neither rich nor famous. Their testaments tell of their beliefs, their family connections, both loving and otherwise, and the possessions they valued.

There are indexes by name and date in the top menu and you can browse by County or by Occupation. Tags may also help you find things that interest you. You can use Search, but remember that the Wills are transcribed as written with no standardisation of spelling. The summary at the start of each Will shows dates, people and places, and for these I have tried to use modern day spellings. The date in the heading of each post is the probate year, which may be later than the year of death. Dates are those used at that time ie. for pre-1752 dates the year starts on 25th March.

The Glossary covers words no longer familiar today such as the terms they used to describe their clothes, household goods and tools of trade.

***** New: A downloadable Index of all the Wills. Access from the Will menus above or here *****

Sources

The majority of the Wills are from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. These are held in The National Archive at Kew. Downloads can be obtained from there or via a subscription to Ancestry or TheGenealogist.

Wills from other jurisdictions are usually held in the local county record office. Reference details are given with each Will. Some, such as Norfolk and Cornwall, are freely available from Family Search and a link is provided (you may need to sign up for a free account). Others, such as Wiltshire and London are available through Ancestry.

The decorative letters used as illustrations are from documents of the time, but not always from the particular Will itself.

Transcription Notes

Some paragraph breaks and full stops have been added to aid reading.   Abbreviations and contractions are expanded in italics. Comments are enclosed in square brackets. Dots represent missing text. This mainly applies to damaged documents and to Latin where my knowledge is insufficient. I have made some attempt at Latin sections but they may well contain errors.