INVESTIGATING our ancestors' wills
This month Family Tree Academy Tutor, David Annal, explores the wills of family in England & Wales
In this month’s Family Tree Academy, I want to focus on our ancestors’ wills. When I do talks about wills there’s invariably someone in the audience who tells me that their ancestors didn’t leave wills – and I have to say that I used to feel that way myself about my own forebears. With generation after generation of Orcadian crofters on my dad’s side and my mum’s Irish labourers there certainly wasn’t much money around and I didn’t really expect any of them to have had anything worth leaving.
This was back in the late 1970s when I was just setting out on my family history journey but once I started digging deeper, extending my research to other branches of the family and to the extended families of aunts, uncles and cousins, I soon discovered that there were plenty of family wills; it was just a case of redefining what I meant by the word ‘family’.
What is a will?
In its simplest form, a will is a set of instructions left by someone, detailing what they want to happen with their possessions after their death. Wills have been around for many hundreds of years; a few years ago, the will of Wynflæd, a 10th-century English noblewoman, was displayed at the British Library as part of an exhibition on the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and there are many English wills surviving from the early medieval period.
The language of the day
Unlike many other legal documents that we might use in the course of our research, wills are almost always written in English. Before 1732, some of the associated documentation (for example, the probate clauses that provide the details of when, where and to whom probate was granted) were usually written in Latin, and it’s useful to learn some basic Latin, but the wills themselves are routinely written in English – or at least, in the English of the day.
A lot of the terms that you’ll come across, particularly when it comes to ownership of land and to agricultural practices, might be unfamiliar to you but there are some useful books that should help you out.
Perseverance with palaeography pays off
The handwriting may also prove an obstacle but all I can suggest here is that you persevere. The more of these old documents you read, the better you’ll get at recognising and interpreting the ‘scrawls and scribbles’ of the old clerks. And even if you can’t work out every single word, you should, with a bit of effort, be able to work out the gist of it.
The proving of wills in church courts
Before the mid-19th century, wills were
