Seeking specific collection of wills from medieval Norfolk - microfilm
Hello!
Many years ago, the Utah Genealogical Society imaged will registers from the Archdeaconry of Norwich and preserved them on microfilm. There are copies in the Norfolk Record Office in the UK but they are of a lower quality than the originals, or so I am told.
I would be willing to travel to Utah (quite a distance) to view these in the library but I cannot get through to ask if the originals exist. I've combed through the probate records in the catalogue but unfortunately cannot find sufficient information to confirm if what I am looking at are the same records I seek. The specific wills I need for my research date from around 1380 to 1550 or so, and almost everything I've found is much, much later than this or does not have sufficient detail in the catalogue entry to confirm to me that I would find what I am seeking. If anyone could help me out by pointing me to the right entry, or where to find the info on here, I'd be very appreciative.
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Following up on the responses above, there seems to be a plethora of stuff but URL https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/278818 is described as "Probate records for the Episcopal Consistory Court, Archdeaconry of Norwich, 1370-1858" - which is the literal match to the original question.
That includes calendars, registered copy wills, original wills, etc, etc. (You may already know the difference between registered copy wills and original wills but if not, the original wills are the actual originals, signed (perhaps) by the testator, while registered copy wills are made contemporary with the probate process and contain the "official" copy - they are made obvious by the fact that two or more wills appear on one page). That URL contains mostly registered copies but there are occasional originals - seemingly where the registered copy volumes have been lost??? That must imply something…
There are (as you may already know) a number of possibly relevant catalog entries - https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/625447 is for "Probate records and marriage licence bonds, 1291-1944" from the Dean and Chapter of Norwich's Peculiar Court, rather than the Consistory Court of the Archdeaconry - just to confuse the possibilities.
So far as I can see, those two URLs that I mention have images available online (and hopefully others do as well), so you can batter you head over the arrangement and contents without going to Salt Lake City.
Good luck - I think you might need it, trying to understand what makes up what…
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@Mikkaela3 did the suggestions above answer your question?
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I did a quick keyword search in the online catalog for Norfolk England Probate. One of the top results was
https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/291384 covering Wills and administrations, 1459-1857. According to the catalog, the images for the earlier years, up to about 1540, are available online, from home, no restrictions. Later ones can be viewed at your local Affiliate Library or FamilySearch Center.
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gives a number of different record sets, of which there are a few of the period required, including the one mentioned by Áine above.
This was a result of clicking on England, Norfolk - Probate records (from https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/625392)
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From a different angle, FindMyPast has a collection "Norfolk Wills & Probate". This only has index entries, but those indexes have a URL that drops you right on the relevant item in the Norfolk Record Office catalogue - for instance
Reference code NCC will register Hubert 88
Title Albard, Benedict, of Woodbridge, Suffolk
Date(s) - 1480 (creation)Level of description Item
Name of creator Diocese of Norwich, Consistory Court; 11th century-; ecclesiastical court; Norwich, Norfolk
(11th century-)
Repository Norfolk Record Office
Scope and content Grant of Administration.If you can get access to FMP, it may be that the search mechanism is more helpful than that on the Norfolk Record Office website.
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I'm sure @Mikkel Eriksen has probably got other issues to attend to, causing the lack of response. However, like @Adrian Bruce1 I have often spent I good deal of time in looking into posters' queries and find it very disappointing when (sometimes after several months have elapsed) there is not even an acknowledgment that my detailed responses have even been read by the OPs.
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Following on from @Paul W's last comment… I have seen in other systems, people apologise for not responding to answers on their queries because "the system never told me that there was an answer". And I usually have a distinct suspicion that the system doesn't actually give those types of notifications.
Does anyone know if the Community automatically notifies a poster of responses? I get plenty of notifications via mail from this Community but I "always" Bookmark threads I've created or posted in, so I don't know whether it's because I've bookmarked them or because the system will tell me anyway.
I know that there are notification settings for the community but I've long since lost track of what the defaults are - so I wonder if non-responders expect notifications but aren't getting them?
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The @mention notification is a setting that is turned on when you first join FamilySearch Community. However, the notification for New answers on my question is not automatically turned on when you first join Community.
So, users only receive a response when an @mention (poster's name) is included in the response. None of the above answers used the @mention in their responses. That was why I @mentioned the user's name when I responded. If she is attending to other matters as @Paul W mentioned above, when she signs back into the Community she will see a number in the read circle next to the envelope icon in the upper right to alert her of any notifications. These notifications can be changed in the notifications settings. Click on the Bell icon and then click the notifications filter icon in the pop-up window to get to your notification settings.
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I have email notifications turned off. My email would have exploded long before now if I had it turned on for the Community.
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Hello to all, and a very special thanks to @Adrian Bruce1 whose link to the pre-1400 wills contained the exact answer to my question of whether or not the items I was seeking were available in digital copy online, and the answer was yes. I am so unfamiliar with this platform that I had not been able to find these particular images or links to them, so this link is exactly what I needed.
As to the offense I unintentionally may have caused by not replying, I will offer first an apology and then the excuse that I had a terrible bout of flu just after posing this question and had very little expectation of it being answered as I rarely get traction with this sort of thing on other platforms. I've never used this platform and I find it very confusing. I also could not find a way to easily navigate back to this forum to look for this thread except through one email I received notifying me of some interaction on it. There were no notifications when I logged into my account and I thought the post was perhaps not approved by the powers that be (as is often the case on online forums when brand-new contributors make a post) but I am very excited that my question was answered and what I hoped was true and easy to access now with the right link.
My sincerest thanks to those who sought to help me answer this question and took the time to thoughtfully reply in detail greater than I expected which was very helpful to me.
As for the wills, the reading is by no means easy but I have been training to do so for my research/field and these images are much clearer than the films available to view on the old machines in the NRO (though I also deeply appreciate their availability). Since this is a place where people appreciate this sort of thing, I can offer a little info as a graduate researcher working on medieval wills.
Very few "original" wills survive - generally speaking - as they are often recorded at the bedside near death and then brought to probate, so the registered wills are the vast majority of what survives from medieval England. They are a legal document but also an ecclesiastical document, so it is very interesting to see how they were managed. Some of these wills have a note about when and where probate happened, and occasionally there is some information about the process (and any hangups, like a lack of funds substantial enough to pay a debt). These wills are for people who lived in the diocese but some of the residents, such as those who had property in more than one diocese, were registered in the Consistory Court of Canterbury and those are also available online through The National Archives (UK). Most registered wills here stand alone without probate records and without inventories of goods, which is sad but not unexpected. There is quite a lot of research into how wills are transcribed and taken down, and I wonder if perhaps sometimes they were being recorded from memory in registers (especially in the case of much shorter wills). Certainly, the ones in Latin are translated from English as it was spoken to the clerk or literate person taking down the final wishes of the testator. Often times, wills were taken by clerks/clergy who probably also offered last rites or prayers at the bedside. It wasn't a rule, and presumably some people were able to pen their own testaments/wills, but I think that would be exceptionally rare to find, especially a signed will. I would love to see one if it's out there somewhere.
I wonder if, in the case of an "original" popping up in these volumes, sometimes copies were made and shoved in where pages were damaged, or if it is simply the case that someone noticed that a document seemed to belong to the collection and placed it in there erroneously. That happened with some regularity in the early days of archive-keeping (which many consider to be the mid/early Victorian era when antiquarians went ham for old documents and started making lists of everything, which are delightfully helpful nowadays). Victorians loved making calendars of random old sets of documents, and the medieval-er the better.
For some clarity, my wills study is a large part of my dissertation research and while I understand this platform is primarily meant for building family trees and carrying out extensive genealogical research, it has been an exceptionally delightful discovery of digital media and I will be recommending that some colleagues look into it for their own research on hard-to-access documents that may have a digital form here. Thanks again!
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