Wills consultation December 2023

I think it would be useful to have a link to the consultation document in this forum thread.

 

Yes, but people don't always do what you expect, do they?

 

Am I missing something or is the only way to respond by email? Surely, given that they are asking specific questions then it would have been easier to set up a response form to collate responses? Relying on someone transcribing information from a barrage of emails seems outdated at best.

 

I'm not English so I can really only offer an opinion here. What I am, though, is a degreed Historian. Did you know that as far as documentation for a History paper or book, scanned, digitized copies and PDFs - and many times photostats - are considered primary sources? I was astounded when my professor told me to include copies of scanned applications to the Dawes Commission (Cherokee land allotment commission at the end of the 19th and early 20th century) and applications to the Guion Miller Commission (Cherokee compensation for the Removals aka The Trail of Tears convened early 20th century) also called Eastern Cherokee Applications in the primary sources section of my paper proposal and final paper. Bowl me over with a feather! So, my question - if the standard of evidence and documentation for a recognized academic discipline is the standard above, is that not also credible for Genealogy given it is not yet acknowledge even as a a specialty within the History discipline? We already apply a far greater level for proof than most academics who don't even use the preponderance of evidence rule to form theories and conclusions, let alone the scientific method (yes, it has a name!) that genealogists employ.

Just curious. I will still continue at the higher level. One professor told me I "mined" primary sources for evidence and asked where I had learned that skill at a higher level than most PhD's applied. Great field, Genealogy! History, by the way, was not considered a serious academic discipline until about the 1850s, or so. Before that it was usually included in Literature.

 

If they give us colour scans of original wills that would be fantastic. Sometimes the current microfilmed rewritten office copies were written just too fast and are really hard to read. Others beautifully easy. We always assume that they are a true and faithful copy.
As many legal processes nowadays have no physical copy, I'm used to the digital version being the only one. Easier to find, read, copy, file.
When I visited Huntingdonshire Archives a couple of years ago I looked at original business accounts, sale particulars, bundles of documents. All different sizes, most impossible to get to lie flat to photograph. Some had pencil notes and differently coloured writing so that is why colour scans are so important.

 

Personally, I find wills invaluable in my family history research and happily pay £1.50 for a digital copy which is such great value for money. That said I do not agree with the proposal to destroy original wills except those of people who are 'famous' or historically important in some way. Having read the consultation document my main concerns can be summed up as 1. the fallibility of systems and future accessibility of digital files and 2. establishing the criteria used to decide whose wills are important enough to be kept in paper form, and what about people who may not be 'important' now but may turn out to be in the future? I don't really see how digital storage can be seen as an environmental advantage either!
I think my suggestion would be that if paper copies have to go that as well as digitising them they were also photographed as microfiche, old technology I know, but perhaps providing a reliable back-up in case of the loss or inaccessibility of digital versions and much easier to store than paper. Another suggestion that may be a drop in the ocean would be to increase the cost of obtaining a digital copy - £1.50 hardly breaks the bank!
Wills are such an important record of relationships, social history and language that the partial or complete loss of such records would be a tragedy and their value should be considered equally with other historical artefacts where the expenditure of £4.5m is probably peanuts. I will email my opinions relating to the questions posed in the document but can't say that I have any confidence in them carrying much weight.
I would be interested to know what your opinion is Peter?

 

One previous instance of the official destruction of historic documents is the Land Registry's policy of "dematerialisation" of deeds. Apart from some being important objects in themselves, in this case they include information about land transfers that are not copied for retention (they do not affect current titles) but have never been available to historians. There does not appear to have been much of a campaign against this, or to mitigate it.

Two quotes from solicitors' newsletters to illustrate the policy:

Some solicitors have continued offering the kind of open-ended deeds storage they traditionally did, but now many "orphan" deeds will never be taken away by a new owner, so they are going to run out of space.

There is now a guidance note on the Land Registry web site, but I have not found any way to reach it from the site itself - only from an external search. So I don't suppose many users see it. This suggests that, if destruction bothers you, you offer the deeds to your local record office as a gift or loan. I don't know how many owners or solicitors do follow this advice, or whether ROs usually accept them.

 

Much of my recent research has been in 17th century probates in Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex Counties, Massachusetts, as I am filling in gaps, loose ends, and busting one brick wall (which of three women of the same name, all born within 3 years, was the one who married my 7th g-g-f, which involved tracking down every available probate for their grandparents, parents, stepparents, uncles, and siblings). Ancestry's database of the Essex probates is a complete mess, but thankfully the NEHGS, in cooperation with the Massachusetts Archives, has them fully indexed, excellently organized, and free.

The difficulty is that black-and-white digital reproductions can sometimes be difficult to read, and any digitization should be full-colour. I have some copies from the Principal Probate Registry, obtained back when they were £5 each (with the exchange rate and the cost of a money order and postage, I think they cost me about CAD12 at the time) and they are very faint.

The other valuable part of the probate file has been the "miscellaneous papers". The bonds of executors and administrators have given clues to family relationships (who signed as surety?), and bonds of guardians have sometimes mentioned the age of the children. Other documents have revealed disputes between the widow and children of the first wife - very useful when birth or marriage records are missing and allocation of the children among multiple wives is difficult. In an intestate estate, the administrator's account is usually the only mention of the heirs. In my very limited experience of the British system, I have not received copies of anything other than the will or the grant of administration, so I don't know what other papers British probate files might contain.

My best discovery, however, predated the digital age. When I first started out in the 1990s, I was living in the Boston area, and did research in person at the Massachusetts Archives. They had, in the reading room, the LDS microfilms of the register books and indices, as the primary resource. (In the American system, the wills, inventories, and orders of the court are transcribed into bound volumes). So I was relying on transcriptions, and in some cases transcriptions of transcriptions, as some books had been copied in the late 18th or early 19th century. In the index entry for one of my ancestors, the immigrant Joseph Jewett, instead of any book and page references, was only the notation "see file". I inquired at the desk, and they retrieved for me the original file from 1661. It was a magical experience to hold the paper and to see the actual signature of an ancestor. Every published genealogy gives Joseph's date of death as 26 February 1660, which, according to the published records of the town of Rowley, was the date of his burial. The heading of the inventory, however, stated "The inventory of the estate of Joseph Jewett, who dyed on the 24th day of February 1660". I had the opportunity to handle 2 or 3 other wills that predated the use of the register books, but that was the most valuable find.

 

If you look at the discussion of the proposal in the consultation document, it does list all the supporting documents that have been kept and are now part of the probate archive (pages 15-16). These are not public documents like a proved will, so have not been made available.

The probate archive is officially viewed at as supporting probate courts, and public access was set up mainly to serve solicitors dealing with probate (of recent wills, obviously). If the historical archive (i.e. older than some arbitrary time limit) was sent to, for example, the National Archives, all of its contents would be available in the same way as other holdings.

But that's not being proposed, nor considered at all,.

 

I can't submit as I don't have English citizenship, but I just want to add - can we ensure the scans are thorough? Many folks here are mentioning full color, which would be fantastic as we can tell if items were altered in the will, pen marks and whatnot, but I also want to add that they go all the way to the edge of the document, even the back of the document? I know I've had the experience where something written "in the margin" or scribbled on the back proved to be critical information (especially for those with very common names) and having it cut off is a real disservice when it comes to document scanning.

Second, it looks like they are looking for definition of famous individuals to determine how to pick wills to keep and wills to digitize and toss. I'll be very curious what they adopt - wikitree for example, uses Wikipedia as a criteria for their notables, but it misses plenty of "famous" people.

Whatever they do, I will be very curious. Almost every place in the US has similar problems with storage space as well, some of which have already destroyed their originals in favor of index books or digitization. Some counties have chosen to offhand their originals to genealogy and historical societies, but that is often a case of passing around the problem.

 

That was also what I thought, based on the idea that a will was private property when written and the state had taken ownership of it at probate. If the state gives up that pre-emptive ownership, shouldn't the will revert to the owner it would have had otherwise?

That's a rather legalistic way of looking it it, which you would think might suit the Ministry of Justice. But administering it legalistically - making sure you find the valid inheritor, or arbitrating between competing valid claims - would be way over the top in terms of complexity and cost. Some kind of quick and simple alternative is needed, if anyone can think of one. For example (to suit the current government's preferences) could you offer them for sale a year at a time to any bidder who thinks they can be sold for a net profit, with FH societies and organisations able to bid too?

One big problem facing anyone wanting to to propose something other than destruction is that there is no information provided about the size of the archive, such as year by year numbers for wills, files, documents, etc. or any physical volumes. You can't take cost or other practical factors into consideration without those numbers.