English held First World War soldiers wills are the latest to be digitised for online presentation, in time for next year's centenary - the BBC has the story at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23861821. To search for a soldier visit https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/
Scottish wills have already been digitised and are available at the National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk) - these will be going onto ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) in the near future.
The National Archives of Ireland has also digitised its soldiers' wills from the conflict - these are freely available at http://soldierswills.nationalarchives.ie/search/sw/home.jsp
(With thanks to @vivdunstan on Twitter)
Chris
My new book, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet, is now available from Pen and Sword. My Scottish land and church records ebooks are available at http://www.gen-ebooks.com/unlock-the-past.html, whilst my next Pharos Scottish course, Scottish Research Online, starts Sep 4th - see http://pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=102. Time to smash a few brick walls...!
The important thing to remember with this database not complete - with 230,000 wills it roughly includes wills for about 1 in 3 of the men who were killed during the war (about 705,000 British servicemen were casualties). For example, I have a soldier's pay-book will for my great-uncle Stanley Crozier who was killed in October 1918, but there is no entry for him.
ReplyDeleteThe best you can say is this resource is one of several probate sources that could be checked - the others being the National Probate Calendar (which contains a surprisingly large number of soldiers' wills) on Ancestry and, as you say, the Scottish and Irish resources on the websites of their respective national archives.
Even so for the majority of men there will be nothing.
Thanks Simon
ReplyDelete