www.wiltshire.gov.uk
Wiltshire Wills Project
Catalogue of Wiltshire Wills now live
Please see: http://history.wiltshire.gov.uk/heritage/index.php to search the new on-line catalogue of Salisbury diocesan probate records. A percentage of the wills (about 25% at present) are accompanied by digital images.
N.B. These are high quality images which occupy a large amount of memory (typically 0.5 - 1 mb), and may take a long time to download if you have a dial-up connection or certain types of browser.
Introduction
The outstanding Salisbury Diocesan Probate collection contains 105 000 wills and inventories dating from Tudor to Victorian times (1540-1858).
This unique collection covers the whole of Wiltshire and Berkshire, parts of Dorset and Uffculme in Devon. The collection is one of the finest in the country, and an invaluable source for historians.
The Wiltshire Wills Project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), has made sure the documents are cared for better than ever in the future. They have all been catalogued onto a computer database, and they are being flattened and re-packaged, repaired where necessary, and digitised. A state of the art "leaf-casting" machine is being used to repair damaged documents. A paper pulp mixture is drained through the holes in the will. The pulp fills in the gaps and, as it dries, paper patches form in the document.
We hope that after reading about the wills, and seeing the examples, you'll agree that they deserve the special care the Wiltshire Wills Project is giving them.
How do I get a copy?
The Wiltshire Wills on-line is a pilot project to make our catalogue and selected digital images available on-line, with assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is currently free to view and use these images for research purposes.
If you would like a colour print-out of all or part of a will, on glossy photographic quality paper, please give us the reference number(s) of the will(s) together with the image number(s). Please note that some images will overlap.
Print-outs will be charged at £5.00 for the first image, and £1.00 for each additional image, plus postage and packing.
Orders under £20.00 in value will be posted to you together with an invoice. For orders of £20.00 and over you will be asked for payment in advance.
Please note
that the pages normally linked to from this homepage, which contain examples of wills and their transcriptions, together with background information about the wills, are in the process of revision and not available at present.
They will be available again by 31 October 2007.
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