Wills and Probate Records
Locating Devon Wills and Administrations
As already mentioned on the first page about wills and probate records, the vast bulk of the original Devon wills and administrations were destroyed during the Second World War, when Exeter Probate Registry was bombed by the Germans during the Blitz of 1942. Therefore, Exeter Probate Registry now only holds original wills and administrations dating after this.
However, copies of all wills proved and letters of administration issued from January 1858 were sent to the Principal Probate Registry in London and can be obtained from there or through the local District Probate registries and by post. Before the Second World War, some of the earlier wills and administrations kept in the Probate Registry had been calendared (listed) and a proportion of these had also been abstracted, or summarised, so that some record of the destroyed wills still survives, even though the originals were destroyed. In addition, copies of some Devon wills proved both before and after 1858, do survive in collections deposited at the three record offices in Devon, and in specialist libraries and archives elsewhere. More information on these types of sources can be found on this page.
Sources available in Exeter – wills from 1858
Wills proved and administrations granted in Devon after 1942 are all held at the Exeter Probate Sub Registry on the 2nd Floor, Crown & County Courts, Southernhay Gardens, Exeter, EX1 1UH (tel: +44 (0) 1392 415370).
The Exeter Probate Registry also has the index to all the wills and administrations - the National Probate Calendar - for England and Wales from 1858 until last year. Devon Record Office also has the same index on microfiche, for dates covering 1858 to 1935.
The National Probate Calendar is a detailed index, which gives the value of the estate and the Registry at which the probate was granted; it also includes the names, addresses and occupations of the deceased person, and his/her executor.
You may search this index at either place, for reference to a will proved anywhere in the country, not just Devon. We can search the index between 1858 to 1935 for you through our Research Service.
If you live in England, but cannot visit Exeter, and are searching for a will proved in Devon after 1857, you may be able to find a copy of the National Probate Calendar at your nearest District Probate Registry. Note however, that many District Registries outside of Devon have in fact transferred their earlier indexes to a local record office. Your nearest record office may therefore have these indexes, or else a microfiche copy of them. To find out about your local District Probate Registry visit the Court Service website. The Society of Genealogists Library in London also holds a copy of the National Probate Calendar, 1858-1930.
Remember that the Exeter Probate Registry does not hold copies of any wills proved in Devon before 1942, nor of any wills at all proved outside Devon. However, if you find reference to a will proved in Devon between 1858 and 1942 in the National Probate Calendars, you may order it in one of the following ways:
- copies of wills proved from 1858 onwards are available in person at the Principal Probate Registry, 1st Avenue House, 42-49 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6NP, U.K.
- postal applications can be sent to the York Probate Sub-Registry, Postal Applications, Duncombe Place, York, YO1 2EA, U.K. Please make out any cheque to HM Paymaster General.
- your local Probate Registry can supply scanned copies of wills proved anywhere in England and Wales from 1858 onwards. Members of the public can go to any Probate Registry in England and Wales and request to order a copy of a will. Each will or administration costs £5 sterling per copy, irrespective of the number of pages. Please make out any cheque to HM Paymaster General.
Devon Record Office has a small selection of copy wills covering all dates, including those after 1857, which have been deposited among solicitors' or family and estate collections, or which are held in the old Exeter City Archives collection.
Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills
The National Archives has the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, which cover mainly the southern half of the country. Printed calendars have been available for many years, but the wills are also indexed and scanned on-line, and digital images of these wills can be downloaded from the National Archives Documents Online website for a charge of £3.50 per will.
Wills of ordinary folk were usually proved within their own county, and generally speaking, therefore, only wealthy persons had their wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Wills of those persons who owned property or goods in more than one diocese were proved in this court. However, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury collection also includes all wills proved in the country between 1652 and 1660, when church courts were abolished and wills had to be proved in London. In the 19th century, the P.C.C. was the only court recognised by the Bank of England, and so wills of testators who held any money in public funds were also proved there.
The wills and probate records of the Prerogative Court of York are held at the Borthwick Institute of the University of York. The Prerogative Court of York only had jurisdiction over people with goods in more than one jurisdiction within the Diocese of York, or who had goods in more than one of the northern dioceses. People with goods in Devon would not have had their wills proved in this court.
Calendars of Devonshire Wills and Administrations
Until 1858, all wills were proved in various church courts, and thus there were many places in each County which a will could be proved. E.A. Fry's Calendar of Devonshire Wills and Administrations, published by the Devonshire Association (1908-1914) lists some of the wills and administrations destroyed in the Probate Registry. Included in E.A Fry's calendar are those wills proved in the Courts of the Principal Registry of the Bishop of Exeter and the Archdeaconry of Exeter.
E.A. Fry’s Calendar of Wills and Administrations relating to the counties of Devon and Cornwall, proved in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Exeter, 1532-1800, and published as volume 46 of the British Record Society Index Library (1914), indexes those wills proved in another of the Bishop of Exeter’s courts.
Lists of wills and administrations proved or granted at two smaller church courts - the Peculiar Court of the Vicars Choral of Exeter, and at the Peculiar Court of the Dean of Exeter (1630s – 1857) also exist in the Library of the Society of Genealogists.
Transcripts of all of these calendars are gradually being added to the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project.
The first two published calendars can be found on the library shelves of the Devon Record Office and the Westcountry Studies Library in Exeter, as well as at the Society of Genealogists Library in London, other family history centre libraries, and major libraries in cities and universities in England and around the world [e.g. the New South Wales Public Library in Sydney, Australia has a copy of the first named calendar].
Fry’s Calendar of Devonshire Wills and Administrations is also searchable on-line on the Ancestry website. It is included in a collection of printed probate registers from the United Kingdom on the Ancestry website, under the heading UK, Extracted Probate Records.
We can search our printed copies of Fry's Calendars, through our Devon Record Office postal/email enquiry service, to see if a will or administration was ever proved in the relevant Exeter church courts for a particular individual.
Please note that all of the above calendars and lists simply index the wills proved and administrations granted, giving the year, name and place of residence of the testators, and thus give no details at all of the actual content of individual wills. However it may help to know that a will once existed, and was proved.
Archdeaconry of Barnstaple Wills
Not all Devon wills were proved in Exeter courts. There is a list of the wills proved in the Court of the Archdeaconry of Barnstaple, which is on the shelf in the Westcountry Studies Library. It is edited by J.J. Beckerlegge, and is titled Index of the Wills and Administrations relating to the County of Devon proved in the Court of the Archdeaconry of Barnstaple, 1563-1858
A sample of this index is included on the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project, and more will eventually be added.
Unfortunately, no such list was made of the wills proved in the Archdeaconry Court of Totnes - and this Court covered a large part of south and west Devon, including Plymouth and the South Hams parishes. The original wills proved at both Barnstaple and Totnes Courts up to 1857 had been sent for storage to Exeter Probate Registry, and were therefore destroyed in 1942.
Copy wills deposited at Devon Record Office
Before the 19th century, as already mentioned, there is only a small chance that a copy of an individual will has survived in Devon. What survives for dates up to 1812 is a very small proportion of that which once existed. However, some copies of wills and administrations have been deposited at Devon Record Office, usually as part of family, estate or solicitors' collections. These wills can date from the 15th through to the 20th century. Sometimes wills deposited in solicitors' collections are only in draft form, and these may be early versions of a will which was later altered before being proved. However sometimes a draft will is the only record of a Devon will which now survives. New collections of deeds in family, estate and solicitor’ collections are deposited in Devon Record Office every year, and fortunately, these sometimes include wills and probate records.
There is a card index in the Devon Record Office to wills and administrations found in catalogued collections held there. This index, which was added to up to about 2002, lists only the name and date and sometimes the parish of residence of the person for whom the will exists. It also indexes wills found in the Exeter City Archives collection held at this office - including Mayor's Court and Orphan' Court wills.
This card index is being added to the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project, and therefore most of the card index entries are now searchable on-line.
For those without Internet access, the wills card index can also be searched for one or two surnames through our postal/email enquiry service. Any longer searches are referred to our fee-paying Research Service. Photocopies of wills found through a search of the card index can be provided where the document itself is suitable for copying.
Some of the Devon Record Office catalogues are now searchable on line through Access to Archives and our own On-line Catalogue. The collections covered by these catalogues may include wills.
Note that the Devon Record Office’s Online Catalogue includes collections held at North Devon Record Office.
However, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office has its own separate online catalogue.
More information on these on-line catalogues.
Devon Wills Index on the Genuki Devon website
The volunteer-run Devon Wills Indexing Project aims to provide an on-line finding-aid in the form of a consolidated index of Devon wills, administrations and inventories. It intends to include (and distinguish between) original documents, probate copies, transcripts and abstracts.
The ultimate aim of the Project is to include information taken from all existing published or publicly available sources of information about Devon wills, administrations and inventories, i.e. of all Devon testamentary material, wherever it may be held.
Each source included on the site is explained in detail.
Eventually, a search of the Genuki Wills Project’s consolidated index should replace searches of all other finding aids, whether on-line, typed, printed or card indexed. Even at this early stage, many Devon wills which did exist or which survive in copy form, have been indexed on this site, and we advise that you search the various sources on the Genuki Devon Wills Project website before contacting Devon Record Office for information on the copy wills which we hold.
Moger and Oswyn-Murray Abstracts
Devon Record Office holds a set of Miss Olive Moger’s typed abstracts of Devon wills. It consists of a series of volumes containing abstracts of selected wills and administrations, compiled by Miss Olive Moger before the second World War. Miss Moger abstracted wills and administrations for those families which interested her, or which she was researching for others, so her series is not complete. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order.
These volumes are being indexed and the index is being added to the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project, so you should check this website before asking for a search of the volumes in the Devon Record Office.
For those without Internet access, or where the relevant volume is not yet indexed and included on the above website, we can search Miss Moger's volumes for a relevant surname through our postal/email enquiry service. If relevant will abstracts are identified, we can provide photocopies of the pages.
Another larger series of abstracts was prepared before the Second World War by Sir Oswyn-Murray and these volumes are kept in the Westcountry Studies Library in Castle Street, Exeter. These volumes are being indexed and a small sample of the index has been added so far, to the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project. This series is not one of our own Record Office resources, but because the Westcountry Studies Library is not able to provide a research service of its own, our fee-paying Research Service can travel into the Library and search these volumes for you.
Moger Abstracts of Testamentary Causes
Devon Record Office also has an index to Series I and Series II of Miss Moger's summaries of testamentary causes or disputes (these were disputes over the proving of wills, which were presented to the Church Court, and survive among the diocesan records). We can search this index through our postal/email enquiry service, and provide photocopies of Miss Moger's handwritten summaries of these dispute papers. We hold the original papers referred to in the abstracts, in un-numbered bundles, and our fee-paying Research Service can search through these and provide photocopies where the original papers are suitable for copying.
Wills in other record offices in Devon
Copies of Devon wills may also be deposited in either North Devon Record Office or Plymouth and West Devon Record Office. These two offices have their own indexes and you need to contact them directly to request a search.
However, please note that the webpage of the Genuki Devon Wills Project includes a transcription of a former Plymouth and West Devon Record Office card index. In addition, most of the copy wills originally deposited at these two offices, were included in the catalogues submitted to Access to Archives up to 2004. The Genuki Devon Wills Project website includes its own indexes to Devon Record Office and North Devon Record Office wills found on Access to Archives.
For wills deposited or catalogued since then, you should first search the relevant online catalogues, before contacting the record offices and requesting a search.
This is a collection of copies of Devon wills (dated 1812-1857) which were held in London for estate duty ('death duty') purposes, and which survived through the Second World War.
From 1796 legacy, succession and estate duty ('death duties') were payable on many estates in England and Wales over a certain value. However, surviving copies of the wills which were subject to this duty only date from 1812 to 1857. This is because it was only from 1812 that copy wills were made - before this, the Death Duty Registers included very brief abstracts of the wills instead. Although the copy wills from 1812 to 1857 for other counties have largely been destroyed, those for Cornwall, Devon and Somerset (from the major local probate courts) were sent to the respective record offices, to fill some of the gap caused by the loss of locally held wills from those counties by enemy action. The collection in Devon Record Office is known as the Inland Revenue Wills Series or the Estate Duty Office Wills.
The wills are available on microfiche at Devon Record Office in Exeter, but they are also available on microfilm by ordering through any Mormon Family History Research Centre in Britain, Canada, Australia, U.S.A. and other overseas countries. To find the address of your nearest Mormon Family History Research Centre, see the website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Note that administration papers are not included in this wills series, and it is likely that wills for estates of little value are also missing, as they did not have to pay any duty. However, because the value of estates subject to this duty changed over time, the proportion of deceased people who had to pay estate duty increased throughout the nineteenth century, as the legislation changed. The Death Duty Registers held at The National Archives illustrate this.
For more information on the history of estate duty wills, see the information leaflet titled Death Duty Records, From 1796, on the Research Guides webpage of The National Archives website.
The index to the Inland Revenue [Estate Duty Office] Wills Series at Devon Record Office is available on-line through the Access to Archives [A2A] website. It is also available on-line on the Genuki Devon Wills Index Project website.
You can search this index on-line for any surname of interest, and order photocopies of any wills found from Devon Record Office by email or post. This is now the quickest way to obtain copies of wills in this collection. If you do not have Internet access, we can search our own paper index to these wills for a small number of surnames through our enquiry service, and supply photocopies of any wills found.
The National Archives holds Death Duty Registers dating from 1796 and ending in 1903. These record details of wills and administrations where death duties or estate duty was due. They are useful for finding out about some of the missing Devon wills dated between 1796 and 1811, as well as administrations between 1812 and 1857, as none of these are included in the Inland Revenue Wills Series.
The value of estates subject to estate duty or death duties changed as time went on. As already explained, the scope of estate duty was extended throughout the nineteenth century, so that gradually more of those people who left assets after death were subject to paying this duty. Between 1796 and 1805 the Death Duty Registers, which record the details of all estates subject to duty, only cover about a quarter of all estates; by 1857, the Registers should include entries for all estates except those worth less than £20. Unlike the Estate Duty Wills Series, the Death Duty Registers also record estates of persons who died without leaving any will, and for which letters of administration were granted. The information in the Register in these cases is not very detailed. In addition, unless the assets were valued at £1,500 or more, the taxes were often not collected, and so the Death Duty Register entry was not filled in with all the details. Death duties were not required of people who died in the service of their country.
Death Duty Registers dating from 1796-1811 have been indexed and scanned on-line, and digital images of all these records are available for downloading – from the National Archives Documents Online website. The Genuki Devon Wills Project website also includes a searchable on-line index (to Devon entries only) in the Death Duty (Estate Duty) Registers for the period 1796-1811. The National Archives reference for Death Duty Registers is IR26.
For those without Internet access, the indexes to these registers are still available on microfilm at The National Archives. The registers themselves can also be seen on microfilm at the same place, though you may be encouraged to look at them online.
As already mentioned, letters of administration granted between 1812 and 1857 are not included in the Inland Revenue Wills Series held at the Devon Record Office.
The Death Duty indexes (ref: IR27) and registers (ref: IR26) for this period include administrations, but they are not currently scanned on-line. However, the Genuki Devon Wills Project is gradually adding an index to Devon administrations found in the Death Duty Registers, 1812-1857, to its website. The registers themselves can be seen by visiting the National Archives.
Even from 1812, when a copy of a will may survive, the Death Duty Registers include information not found elsewhere, and certainly not in the will itself. They show what happened to someone's personal estate (not freehold) after death; and what it was actually worth, excluding debts and expenses. They can give the name of the deceased person, with address and last occupation, the date the will was written, the place and date of probate, the names, addresses and occupations of the executors, and details of estates, legacies, trustees, legatees, annuities and the duty paid. They can also give the date of death, and information about the people who received bequests (beneficiaries), or who were the next-of-kin, with their exact relationship to the deceased. Tax was not payable on bequests to people within a closely defined family circle, and as a result the family relationship was often noted in the registers. From 1815, only bequests to the spouse were exempt from paying tax. Because information could be added to the registers for many years after the first entry, they can include information such as dates of death of spouse; dates of death or marriage of beneficiaries; births of posthumous children and grandchildren; change of address; references to law suits, cross references to other entries, etc.
All indexes (ref: IR27) and surviving registers (ref: IR26) up to 1903 can also be seen at The National Archives. All of the indexes to 1903 together with the Death Duty Registers from 1858 to 1861 are filmed. Registers dated between 1861 and 1903 are original (unfilmed) documents.
Note that many of the registers for the 1890s do not survive, as they were destroyed by fire.
Wills and Probate Records, Karen Grannum & Nigel Taylor, The National Archives, 2009.
When death us do part: understanding and interpreting the probate records of early modern England, ed. Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans & Nigel Goose, Oxford, 2000.
Tracing Your Ancestors in The National Archives, Amanda Bevan, 7th edn, Kew, 2006
Ecclesiastical courts, their officials and records, Colin R Chapman, Dursley, 1997.
An introduction to... affection defying the power of death: wills, probate and death duty records, Jane Cox, Birmingham, 1993
Probate jurisdictions: where to look for wills, Jeremy Gibson & Else Churchill, 5th edn., Bury, 2002
Words from wills and other probate records, 1500-1800: a glossary, Stuart A Raymond, Bury, 2004
Calendars of Devonshire Wills, E.A. Fry (Editor), Devonshire Association, 1908 and 1914
Devonshire Wills, a Collection of Annotated Testamentary Abstracts, Charles Worthy, 1896
Wills and their whereabouts, Anthony J Camp, 4th edn., London, 1974
A Simplified Guide to Probate Jurisdictions, Jeremy S.W. Gibson, Gibson’s Guides, Federation of Family History Societies, 1980
The National Archives publishes useful, up-to-date Research Guides on its web site. These include:
- Family History in England and Wales
- Wills and Death Duty Records After 1858
- Wills and Probate Records
- Wills Before 1858: Where to Start
- Death Duty Records, From 1796
- Death Duty Registers, How to Interpret
