Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of time transcribing a huge amount of wills for one client who was researching numerous lines of his wealthy ancestors. Will transcription is a very useful skill in genealogy because wills can be a really important source of genealogical information, as well as giving you insights into an ancestor’s character, property and status.
However, for many people transcribing an old will is a real problem, and it is not just about the handwriting. The older the will (or document) is, not only does the handwriting get more difficult to decipher, but also the words, phrases and legal jargon become more difficult to understand because they are often now obsolete. This can trip you up even when you are skilled at transcribing old hand. Not only that, but spellings are not standardised – and the further back you go, the more varied the spellings can be.
This is probably why many people do not use probate records as much as they should. First of all, you have to find the will (not always as easy as it sounds – many of them are not readily available online), then you have to try and work out what it says, and then understand the legal jargon and various words and phrases that are now out of use.
Many wills come with inventories, which are extremely interesting, but can pose even more problems with many obsolete household and ‘stock-in-trade’ items that can be very difficult to work out.
But I heartily encourage any amateur genealogist to try and learn these skills, especially if you have lots of ancestors who had property and are likely to have left wills. At present I have a course on Udemy that will help you in the tracing of wills – and a little bit of transcription knowledge too. I am planning to create another course in transcribing at some point. In the meantime, I recommend the free tutorial provided by the National Archives, which will give you a good grounding in reading old hand: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/
Once you have learned some palaeography – the study of old handwriting – the best thing to do is to practise it as much as possible. Once you understand some basic transcription tricks (e.g. how some letters look completely different 300 years ago, and making sure you read letter by letter rather than trying to decipher a word in one go), then you will start to find it easier than you first thought.
But even I, with many years of transcription experience, can still get tripped up by a word or phrase. The letters seem to be what I think they are – but the word looks alien! This is when I start searching the internet for possible answers.
There are some websites that will give you lists of words and phrases used in wills, including some of the household items you might find listed in inventories. However, none of these lists is fully comprehensive, so you won’t find every single word you come across on these. It is probably the case that there are words and phrases that are used locally that have been completely lost, and don’t turn up that often, and so have not made it to any list. I have added a few links to the bottom of this post that may be of help.
If you still are having difficulty, or you just haven’t got the time to spend learning old script, then I do offer a will-transcribing service. Just contact me at info@tracingancestors-uk.com for more details – or have a look at my will transcription page.
Here are a few links that may be of use to you:
List of words and phrases in 18th century wills
Glossary of words used in wills:
Some unfamiliar words in wills & inventories
Hi Ros,
I have found your various posts on wills, and the associated comments and replies, most interesting and helpful. I am deep into a project to transcribe wills of local people for our village history society. Most of the time I have little trouble but I’ve now worked my way back to the 17th Century when some of the probate statements are in Latin – and my Latin is near non-existent. Usually the most important pieces of information – names and dates – are clear but it would be nice to make a decent full transcription. To that end it would be really helpful to have a few examples to hand (both originals and transcriptions), especially those containing common abbreviations. Do you know if anyone has made anything like this freely available?
Many thanks
Hi Richard. Thanks for your comment.
I know exactly what you mean. My Latin is extremely basic, so often it’s just the dates and names I can make out from the probate. But I often don’t worry too much about it as they are usually fairly standard statements, just saying that the executors have made an oath to carry out the administration.
We are lucky that the wills themselves are usually in English!
While there are several websites and books that will help with the writing and/or archaic words and phrases in the will itself, but I don’t know of any that help with the probate statement.
Some of the websites I use:
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~fordingtondorset/genealogy/Files/Glossary.html
https://www.bosburyhistoryresource.org.uk/legal-terms.html
The National Archives has some useful pages on wills including: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/wills-1384-1858/
I don’t know if this will help – but probably you might find some booklets that have examples of Latin and/or abbreviations – often published by Family History Societies – and you would probably find some at your local record office.
Best wishes
Ros