Monday 22 July 2019

Find a Will drops price of historic wills

Thanks to Chalfont Research via Twitter (@ChalfontR) for the following:

"Anyone noticed that the cost of downloading wills from the probate service has gone down from £10 to £1.50? #genealogy #result"

It's true. The following is the new section on how to pay in the Find a Will site at https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk, which permits you to order copies of English and Welsh wills post-1858:

How to pay for your copy grant or will

The fee for each copy request is £1.50 to download (the £1.50 charge is required by law for the release of public documents. You will receive a copy of the grant of representation and the will if there is one. You can pay online using a debit or credit card.

If you are unable to pay with a credit or debit card, then you can download form PA1S from https://www.gov.uk/wills-probate-inheritance/searching-for-probate-records. The form will have an address to send it to together with your cheque. This service will take 4 weeks

Have fun!

Chris

Pre-order Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) for just £11.99 at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Family-History-on-the-Internet-Paperback/p/16483. Details of my genealogical research service are available at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. Further news published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

3 comments:

  1. Great timing on this one Chris. I am teaching a class on English Probate this afternoon as part of a week long course on English research (19 classes in 4.5 days) and though I demonstrate using the probate search I for one had not caught the price drop. Thanks

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  2. No probs Paul - hoping it's not a typo at their end!

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  3. Yes, £1.50. Careful, though...I wanted 4 wills, had a few of the request forms reset themselves and I had to type the details again. Went to the payment page. Total says 4 wills, £6.00. Click on the VISA and it asks for £10.50 payment. Some kind of handling fee being added? I didn't want to click on Back to see what was happening because it seemed likely it would lose all my purchases again. Put the order through and got an email invoice showing 4 wills and 3 duplicates. Sent a message to support who say they can't do refunds as it is a "statute fee and indiscriminate of the results".

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