Wills consultation December 2023

Thank you, it will be interesting to hear what they say.

 

Right at this moment!! I’m not not sure if I am bothered on a personal basis whether they get rid of the originals to save storage costs or not providing the access to the digital copy is a clear one of the original that can be easily accessed. What does concern me however, is the future, not perhaps a few years or even 10s of years but maybe in 100s time, will access to the internet still be available. Will digitised copies still be readable. I just wonder what safeguards there will be to ensure they can be. What will happen if some megalomaniac decides to delete the internet. Would that mean that in an instant all these precious records will completely disappear, never to be available to any our our descendants? Or am I being over dramatic?

 

But will it? The probl

 

Mmm! Not sure what happened there!!!
I was going to flag up the awful problems the British library has had as a result of the ransomware attack last year when 1000s of files were stolen! It could be next year before they are restored. If that means having to re digitise the originals, and the original has been destroyed, what then!

 

I have now received the full copy of the Will, and it looks as if its a new scan from the original.

 

I asked the Probate service the following question:- "If I apply for probate Online is the whole process online with a scanned copy of Will, or do you need a physical copy by post?"
There reply was as follows.
"CTSC Probate Query,
Good morning,
We would require the physical original Will sent to us via post.
Many thanks,
CTSC Support Officer | Probate Team
CTSC Birmingham| Tel: 0300 303 0648
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail or its attachments.
I am not authorised to bind the Ministry of Justice contractually, nor to make representations or other statements which may bind the Ministry of Justice in any way via electronic means."

There was much discussion about 'Office Copies' and I just wanted to clarify that the executors and hence family history researchers loose access to the original Will when applying for Probate. Executors should always make a good colour copy of the original Will just in case it gets lost in the post!

 

Good question, new scan was just plain old black & white.

 

With more recent wills it’s not always easy to tell, as the office copies will be photocopies or scans of the original will. So both will show what will appear to be original signatures.

 

Last time I was an executor, in 2016 and before you could apply online, you were required to send in 3 copies of the will along with the original, and we did of course keep the scan from which we printed those copies. We also took the precaution of using ‘special delivery’, which while not cheap, is worth doing for peace of mind. I’m not sure a copy, however good, would be immediately accepted if the original did get lost in the post, though it may be in the long run if all else fails.

 

Pauline, This was a Will made and then executed in 2001. The first 'copy' I received consisted of part of first page and last page. The part of last page did not have a stamp on it saying "WILL PROVED AT OXFORD 16 AUG" (year unreadable). From that I conclude that the first 'copy' I received was a copy of part of original and the new copy was of the 'office copy'?? See copy of last page attached, right hand side of image correct copy.

 

The copies you were sent certainly look to have been made from different versions of the will, but I would suspect the RH one might have been made from the original will. Unless the LH one was scanned really badly, it has the appearance of a not dark enough photocopy, while the RH one is darker, clearer, and all visible (except that date stamp).

It may be that because the ‘office copy’ was itself a poor copy, that they redid the scan from the original will. I doubt it can be taken as an indication of any intention to re-scan all wills from the original original.

 

I have obtained from the probate office wills and probates for ancestors. It is rare to get a copy of an original. They have almost always been copies of the transcribed wills. Everything is written in the same hand as the wills above and below. So what happened to those original wills? Are they already gone?

 

Mostly, no. See my post #36 above.

 

In the latest newsletter Peter mentioned the possibility of TNA taking over the original copies. In my submission I pointed out that putting the originals into deep storage would be much cheaper than the amount currently being spent on them as there would be an expectation that they wouldn't often - if ever - need to be accessed. They would be stored (I assume) just as the original 1841-1921 census records are stored. It would be interesting to know whether the genealogy companies like Ancestry or Findmypast pay a regular amount to TNA to cover the cost of storage and occasional retrieval of originals.

 

We don't know for sure, though the official policy has always been to keep then for ever. From the start, local registries kept the originals and only sent copies to the principal registry, which became the national archive. It seems likely copies became the only versions ever used and sent out, being a lot easier to handle than originals of all shapes and sizes and materials and variable handwriting. The originals have most likely all been sent to the archive in Birmingham - but we don't know, as we haven't been told.

This is part of a bigger problem: the lack of any information about the physical archive holding, in terms of what's actually in it (we just have a list of what might be), how many items are held and how big it all is, how that varies with date, etc. I did ask for this to be provided, as its lack makes it hard to propose alternatives to their ideas, and thus biases the consultation. I have had no reply of any kind.