Many thanks to the kind people who have already provided
details of their ancestors' Wills for this project.
Please respect our Conditions of Use.
If you have ANY Gloucestershire, or Gloucestershire-related Wills, and are
willing to share the details with us on this site, I would be
delighted if you would be so kind as to send me details. The email address to use
is at the end of the following notes.
I do not intend to publish full transcripts; but the minimum details
I suggest are:-
Name of Testator
Parish, or Place of Residence (if available)
Date of Probate (or of writing the Will if you don't have a date of Probate)
Where Probate was granted (the Court at which the Will was proved)
In addition, it would be nice to have:-
Occupation (or status - eg yeoman, widow)
A list of Beneficiaries, with relationships to the deceased (if stated)
Names of any Witnesses, Trustees, Sponsors, Overseers, &c.
Any other information you feel is of interest.
Please DO NOT send scanned images of Wills as this is likely to
be a breach of copyright. You can if you wish submit complete transcripts,
but please note this may not in your best interests. As I am not able
to publish them in full, I will have to prepare the summaries myself, and I
may discard parts which are important to you.
New Wills abstracts should appear online within a week of my receiving them,
together with an email, or website address where you can be contacted, unless
you prefer to remain anonymous, in which case just let me know in your message.
Thank you in advance for your assistance. You can send contributions to
the following email address:-
IMPORTANT: Clicking the above link will create a new email with subject
"Gloucestershire_Probate_Records". If you create the message yourself,
please include the word "Probate" in the subject to so I can be sure
to spot it amongst the large amount of email I receive to this address.
Otherwise your message may be discarded before I see it.
The idea for this, and other Wills collections I maintain came originally from
Leslie Mahler, who emailed me its very
first entry, in the hope that it would be useful to someone.
One of its purposes could be to assist in locating
those hard-to-find female lines. Perhaps a father's Will may be the
ONLY indication of parentage for a married daughter, when a baptism,
or even her marriage, goes unrecorded. Or else you may be interested
simply in extending your Family History, in the broadest sense, in
learning which families were related, or how far some people travelled.
An example of the former is the Will of
William BROOMHEAD, dated 1813 in which he names his married
daughter Sarah, wife of William WILD. I had been
unable to trace any recorded baptism for Sarah, so if it weren't for
her father's Will, I would never have known her parents.
An example of the latter is in Jacob BAGSHAW's
Will, dated 1785. He was a bachelor, but his Will names a lot of relatives, some of whom
moved to London. If you were researching BAGSHAW from the London end,
the Will may provide the very information you are looking for - telling
you where the family you are researching came from!
The format I've adopted for the Wills collection as a whole, is :-
SURNAME, forename - residence and occupation, date the Will was WRITTEN
(when known) followed by date of DEATH, again if known. Following this is
a list of benefactors, and those mentioned in the Will, with Witnesses, Appraisers
of Inventory, &c. The date of PROBATE comes at the end.
In probably 99% of cases in our collection, the Will has been written just
a short while before death and probate. There is one case however, where it
was 20+ years before, and plenty of examples where the Will has been made
and a benefactor, or executor has died before the Will has been proved. So
whilst on the fact of it a date of when a Will was written would appear to
be meaningless, it could help pinpoint dates between which other events
could have taken place.
Search GENUKI Gloucestershire Probate Records
[Created 1 Sep 2000. Last updated 7 Jun 2009 - 11:02 by Rosemary Lockie]