Have a go! Look out for the questions on the Academy pages, suitable for beginners, intermediate and more advanced. To save you hunting for the answers, we will circulate them in the FREE Family Tree enewsletter. Simply sign up by 25th September at www.familytree.co.uk/account/register/
Beginners: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous British engineer, died on 15 September 1859. Can you find out when his will was proved?
Intermediate: The actress, Sarah Siddons (née Kemble), died in London on 8 June 1831. Where and when was her will proved?
I
n this month’s Family Tree Academy, I want to focus on our ancestors’ wills. When I do talks about wills there’s invariably someone in the audience who tells me that their ancestors didn’t leave wills – and I have to say that I used to feel that way myself about my own forebears. With generation after generation of Orcadian crofters on my dad’s side and my mum’s Irish labourers there certainly wasn’t much money around and I didn’t really expect any of them to have had anything worth leaving.
Advanced: Elizabeth Ashby died on 9 August 1810 and was buried at Barwell, Leicestershire five days later, leaving an extensive will. Where and when was her husband’s will proved?
This was back in the late 1970s when I was just setting out on my family history journey but once I started
Thinking Outside The Box: How might the Inland Revenue’s Death Duty registers help with your search for your ancestors’ wills?
digging deeper, extending my research to other branches of the family and to the extended families of aunts, uncles and cousins, I soon discovered that there were plenty of family wills; it was just a case of redefining what I meant by the word ‘family’.
What is a will?
In its simplest form, a will is a set of instructions left by someone, detailing what they want to happen with their possessions after their death. Wills have been around for many hundreds of years; a few years ago, the will of Wynflæd, a 10th-century English noblewoman, was displayed at the British Library as part of an exhibition on the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and there are many English wills surviving from the early medieval period.
The Prerogative Office in Victorian times Doctors’ Commons, London (1860).