The ‘Archive of the Month’ at the Borthwick is the York Diocesan Probate Collection. To have these records online should be a great boon to researchers.
Information from the Borthwick:
Archive of the Month: York Diocesan Archive Probate Collection
What is it? The wills proved at the Prerogative, Exchequer and Peculiar Courts of Probate in York between 1389 and 1858, covering most of Northern England.
Where can I find it? All of the probate registers and surviving original wills are housed here at the Borthwick. The probate registers have been indexed by name and can be searched here and on Ancestry and Find My Past. As of the 31st March you can also view original scans of all of the wills in the probate registers on Ancestry. Please contact us if you need help or advice on how to find a will.
Why is it Archive of the Month? With the launch of the probate registers on Ancestry.com this seems an excellent time to celebrate the Borthwick’s vast probate collection. You may already be familiar with it, certainly enquiries about wills and orders for scanned copies of wills make up a substantial part of the hundreds of emails, letters and phone calls our searchroom team receive each month.
For those who are less familiar, until 1858 there were two main jurisdictions for probate in England – Canterbury in the south and York in the north. If a person made a last will and testament, then following their death that will would need to be ‘proved’ by a Court of Probate, in other words the court would need to see the original will and rule that it has been made and witnessed correctly and was therefore a legally binding document. Once it had been proved by the court, the text of the will was copied into one of a series of probate registers and the original will was rolled up and filed away in the diocesan probate registry. In theory, this should mean that for every will proved at York, there should be an original will and a copy of the text of the will in the relevant probate register for that year. In reality (and as many researchers have discovered) sometimes the original will has not survived and all that remains is the probate register copy. You can read a more detailed guide to the probate courts, and the exceptions to coverage, on our website.