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Family History and Genealogy Information

Wills and Letters of Administration

Wills and letters of administration (where no will for an individual was made) can offer information that often gives that vital clue or link in your ancestral searches. All wills after 1858 are kept at the Principal Probate Registry, Somerset House, London WC2R 1LA. You can consult indexes at the registry, or copies at your local district registry, reference library or record office. Photocopies are available from the registry at a modest cost.

Before 1858 wills are often kept at local joint record offices, and your county record office will help you with their location. My research of wills were kept at the Lichfield Joint Record Office in Staffordshire. Here they have calendars, which are indexes of the wills they have, and you can request a will to study at the office, plus you can get a photocopy cheaply. The wills are normally handwritten and if you go back far enough, could be in Latin. This should not put you off as you can glean information from these wills with some careful study. Letters of administration where the individual did not leave a will, are more limited in their information, but should be studied along with your will searches.

The links below show a sample will that I have taken out the important points for my researches. There is much information, such as the religious portion at the beginning of a will, that can be ignored for the purposes of research relevance. The sample will extract shows the information taken from the original document, and the original will sample is a scanned image of part of the original will kept at Lichfield Joint Record Office. The Will Archive lists all the Shemilt wills I found at the Lichfield Joint Record Office. It also shows extracts taken from many of the original wills, used in the family history research, to provide proofs and links within the family.