Wills consultation December 2023

I am currently working on a project with the Society of Genealogists that is transcribing pedigrees into GEDCOM files that can then be viewed online with the pedigree images.
One I did recently included a page that was compiled by executors of an English will to confirm the beneficiaries of the will. I'm assuming this was included with the will as accompanying documents. This particular document included the name of every first cousin of the deceased (including birth & married names), their mother's name & maiden name, their grandmother's name & maiden name, where they were living at the time of death and their date of birth.
It was a goldmine of information for a researcher that would be lost if accompanying documentation was not kept.

 

Not with post 1858 wills, as far as I know, but you do sometimes find accounts associated with older wills or administrations, which may of necessity include details of all relatives entitled to inherit. Similar information may appear in the death duty registers, or you may find later accounts made by executors which have been deposited in archives.

 

I have two of those executor's family trees too, and I agree about how useful they are. But I don't see how this kind of material is likely to appear in the probate court's archives. A will is proved as written, now as in the past, accepting it as valid, and confirming who will be executors. That's the end of the probate registry's involvement; the administration of the will and estate is left to the executors. Accounts are given to the residual legatees, but not filed officially anywhere.

If parts of the will failed, for example because named legatees had died and nothing in the will took account of that, then that part was distributed as an intestacy (i.e. as if there was no will). But the work of finding all the current inheritors, by tracing he family tree, all happens after probate. That tree may not even be copied as part of the account, though the relationships are likely to be there in written form.

In a few rare cases, a will or the grant of probate is contested in a court case. Some of those are in the probate court, though others were heard in chancery. The consultation document is not very clear about whether probate court case documents are part of the current "kept for ever" archive, but if the grant was in question I guess they must be.