Each index record has the Forename and Surname of the testator, the Place (usually the English county) where they resided, and the Month and Year when probate was granted.
Where the place of residence was not England, the country may be given (most commonly Scotland or Ireland), or 'Foreign Parts' - which may be any place outside the British Isles.
Example index records
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Incompleteness of the present index
Please note: The present index, which includes about 208,000 entries, is not complete, but it was felt that it was worthwhile making this version available in any case. About 15% of the records are yet to be added.
- Records which are missing are largely ones where the surname is unusual. If you are searching a relatively common name it is likely that the index record is present.
- Where the original printed entry gave alternative surname (eg. BICKNELL, Thomas, otherwise CAREY) there are index entries under both surnames. Index records do not currently indicate that there is an alternative entry, this information will be added later.
- In the case of titled persons and ecclesiastical dignatories (eg. bishops) the person is indexed by the titular Place and Forename, eg. a will for the Earl of Bristol is indexed under BRISTOL, Augustus John; one for the Bishop of Bristol is indexed under BRISTOL, Christopher. These entries will extended later to make the designations explicit.
- In many entries for seamen the printed index identifies the ship on which they most recently served. This information is currently missing from the online index and will be added later.
Online ordering
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About the Prerogative Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury
By 1750 the Prerogative Court of the Archbishop Canterbury (PCC) was proving Wills and granting Administrations at a rate of about 7,000 a year, and this number had grown to about 12,000 a year by 1800.
It was the supreme church court in the British Isles for the probate of wills, and because of the great prestige of its acts and the greater safety of its records it had attracted the probate of wills of men of substance at least since the Reformation.
The Bank of England acknowledged no probate other than of this court, and the wills of persons who died abroad possessing property in this country were almost invariably proved at Canterbury. Because of this the PCC wills include copies of those of numerous Irish and colonial persons who had a second probate at the PCC and whose wills have not survived in their own countries. Particularly in the period under consideration, thousands of bi-national Hollanders and other Europeans who had invested money in the British funds (again whose wills may not have survived or be easily accessible in their own countries) had their wills proven by the PCC.
The Bank of England did accept wills proved in other courts before 1812, but after that date it demanded PCC wills only.
The PCC was also the 'local court' for those possessing property in more than two dioceses in the Province of Canterbury and thus contains the wills of a great number of people in the south of England and particularly in the Home Counties (excepting Kent - see below), as also for those who had property in both the provinces of Canterbury and York.
In Kent the Archbishop of Canterbury delegated his powers to his commissary general, but this does not mean that no Kent entries are to be found in the PCC - though rare, they do appear.
How this index was made
Originally the only means of reference to the PCC probate records was a series of contemporary manuscript calendars arranged in chronological order and subdivided by the first letter of the surname only.
For searches towards the end of the eighteenth century fifteen or twenty minutes might be needed to examine a year's entries in these calendars for a single surname and a search over several years when the exact date of death was not known could sometimes be a very lengthy task.
There were three or four sets of these calendars, one set having been used in the Literary Department at the Principal Probate Registry and another in the Public Search Room there, and individual volumes having been copied again as they became faint and worn.
One of these sets was borrowed by the Society of Genealogists, and between 1968 and 1973 volunteers were organised to write slips for the half million entries they contained. These slips were then sorted into strict alphabetical order, no attempt being made to sort variants of surnames together or cross-reference them, the wills being kept separate from the administrations. From this slip index a typewritten index was created.
The present index, which contains 208,000 records, was created from the typewritten index.
Accuracy of original calendars and errors in the index
It has long been recognised that the calendars from which this index is compiled are not complete. From the work done on the late seventeenth century calendars it has been calculated that references to about a tenth of the filed original and register copy wills were accidentally omitted. There is no reason to expect that the compilers of the later calendars were any more careful.
However, the immense labour of checking the calendars against the Act Books, the Original Wills and the Register Copy Wills was impossible in this case with the resources available.
In creating the typewritten index great care was taken to discover and correct many of these errors as possible. Thousands of doubtful entries spotted in the sorting and typing were checked against the calendars now in use at The National Archives, which are clearer and probably more accurate than those used by the indexers. However, it is important that users of this index should realise its limitations.
See Help on Searching - Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills Index for details of spelling variations and errors in the index.
Finding an entry that is not in the index or a copy of the will
If all the possible spelling variations are taken into account and an entry is not found in this index which might with good cause be expected to be there we can only suggest that the Probate Act Books at The National Archives be searched.
The only other published index to any part of the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury which relates to this period covers the Inventories from 1750 to 1782 (List and Index Society, vol. 86, 1973) but as there is only about one inventory filed for each eight hundred grants and two-thirds of these relate to administrations and not to wills they are little help as a check in this instance.
Other indexes to PCC wills
Printed indexes exist for the period 1383 to 1700, mainly published by the British Record Society in the series known as the Index Library and for the period 1701-49 prepared by the Friends of The National Archives.
| See also: | Help on Searching - Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills Index |
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