Where there's a will...
The Consultation
Just over a year ago, on 15 December 2023, the Ministry of Justice published proposals to scan its archive of over 110 million wills and other probate documents which date back to the beginning of civil probate in 1858. This was not particularly contentious, but the associated proposal that once scanned, the original documents would be destroyed caused considerable concern. The Ministry invited interested parties to comment on the proposal and following the receipt of over 1,600 responses, many from family historians and most of them strongly opposing the proposal to destroy the original documents. Fortunately, in the face of such reasoned opposition, on 8 January 2025 the Ministry dropped the proposal. The Ministry's response can be viewed HERE.
Why the wills should be preserved
Opposition from family historians focused on a number of issues:
- That individual pages or whole documents might be overlooked or imperfectly scanned.
- That the quality of scanning would not be consistently of such quality that all pages would be fully legible throughout.
- That the longevity of digital archives was, as yet, unproven and the whole archive might at some point be lost.
Family historians have previous experience of well-intended exercises to make records more accessible which proved to be less than perfect. Going back before the era of digitisation, microfilming of the GRO's indexes of births, marriages and death was flawed by the missing-out of whole page-openings (two pages accidentally turned over at once). It is not uncommon to find similarly omitted pages in scanned parish registers (I could cite half a dozen examples). Imperfect microfilming or scanning is evident on many newspaper pages in the British Newspaper Archive collection such that the affected pages are wholly or partially unreadable (which also excludes the content from OCR-based searches).
Even where great pains are taken to obtain the best possible legibility and completeness, the results can fall short of perfect. A good example is the digitisation of the "unfilmed" portions of the 1851 census for Manchester by Ancestry. Sophisticated illumination methods were used to maximise the contrast between the pale ink and the water and smoke stained paper and the results are impressive. However, when compared to the manual transcriptions made from the original returns by MLFHS volunteers working under ray Hulley, it is immediately obvious that the scanned images are no substitute for the original, even if it takes a ten year project to extract the information.
Where do we go from here?
The report does not provide an answer to the digitisation question beyond abandoning their original proposal to "digitise and destroy". The conclusions state:
122. At present digitisation is confined to wills submitted with new probate
applications (since 2021), and where requests are received to make inspect a will or
grant of probate. This will continue to be the practice, but any systematic
programme of digitising older wills would have to be considered alongside other
calls and priorities on the Ministry’s resources.
This might suggest that digitisation has not been ruled out. However, given the present pressures on government spending, such a project is likely to struggle to secure reliable funding to carry it through to completion. Perhaps a better option would be to seek a partnership with a specialist provider such as Ancestry or Findmypast. There is precedent with the 1841 to 1921 censuses and 1939 register, though this would be a considerably more difficult undertaking. Will government be this bold?
The conclusions also state:
123. Similarly, the decision to preserve original wills does not address the
concerns about the large and increasing costs of preserving the very extensive
original will archive (which dates back to 1858). The current cost of obtaining a copy
of a will is £1.50 which does not cover the costs of providing this service and does
not represent full cost recovery. It is also significantly cheaper than copies of
obtaining comparable public records (for example, the fee for birth or death
certificates is £12.50)
While nobody wishes to see a price increase, the present charge is embarrassingly low considering that it will involve retrieving the documents, scanning possibly several pages, dealing with the customer order and then re-filing the documents. Even if the operator was paid only minimum wage, this allows them a mere six minutes at most even without any breaks. Considering the unavoidable overheads, the service must lose money hand-over-fist. Given that we probably order a dozen BMD certificates for each will we are fortunate enough to locate, a similar charge would not be unreasonable, particularly if it could be downloaded immediately from an online database.
This will be an interesting story to follow.
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