About the National Wills Index

• More Information for Owners and Custodians of Probate Material
• Contact details for other NWI participants

The National Wills Index is a collaborative project involving different types of organisations who share a common interest in improving accessibility to probate records. All parties involved gain far greater benefit from participating in this project than could be achieved working on their own; the NWI is a genuine “all win” project, but the main ultimate beneficiaries of the project are family history researchers, ie the general public. The NWI website has been developed and is operated by The Origins Network.

Current participants in the NWI include England’s major publisher of probate indexes (BRS), the world’s largest organisation specialising in genealogy (Genealogical Society of Utah), one of England’s great archives (the Borthwick Institute), and local record offices. The Origins Network is working closely with the BRS and GSU to bring further organisations into the project. We expect that several more local record offices will join the project over the next few months.

The long term NWI objective is to make all probate indexes available free, with payment only being required for access to images of the source documents. In the shorter term to generate income to fund the on-going NWI digitisation work and to provide additional income to often hard-pressed archives we must charge for access to much of the NWI data. All probate material for which access is chargeable generates royalty income for the owner. But where participants have already made indexes available free or where they wish to do so, we will also make this data available free on the NWI. The value of any probate index will be greatly increased by allowing it to be searchable alongside all the other NWI indexes.

All participating organisations in the NWI get free access to the NWI within their own premises. So if, for example, you are a local record office, and allow your material to be placed in the NWI, visitors to your office will have free access to the whole of the NWI.

We wish to work with the repositories of original documents to have their documents converted to digital image form. Where good quality microfilm versions are available, we would generally digitise from the film; otherwise the original documents would be scanned (as is the case with Oxfordshire Record Office). If the original material has not been indexed, we will undertake to create high quality indexes. (Origins has a track record for creating high quality indexes to old manuscript material.) We are already working to create full name and place indexes to some probate series, and this will be an on-going component of the NWI project. In all of this, there is no cost to the repository or archive: we take on full responsibility for the work - technical, managerial, and cost. Copies of all digitised material (indexes or digital images) are provided to the repository or archive for their own internal use.

In all cases where indexes are available on the NWI we want to ensure that researchers can access the source documents. In most cases this will mean hard copy services initially, until the documents are available in digital form. So we try to make arrangements with each archive to provide such a hard copy service before the indexes go online. The user can place an order for the indexed document(s) and pay online. The orders are passed electronically (by email) to the archive, who fulfil the order. We take a small commission from the charge made, the balance going to the archive. This can be a significant source of extra income for the archive. Currently such hard copy services are available for the great majority of probate records for which are indexed on British Origins. For these services to work smoothly, we ensure that the index records contain the up-to-date references to the source documents, as used by the archive.

If you would like to discuss participation in the NWI, please contact Ian Galbraith, The Origins Network. British Record Society
Cold Arbour,
Coldharbour Road
Pyrford,
Surrey
GU22 8SJ
www.britishrecordsociety.org
Contact: Cliff Webb, General Editor, cliffwebbhistorian@yahoo.co.uk

FamilySearch International
185 Penns Lane
Sutton Coldfield
West Midlands,
B76 1JU
Contact: Keith Withington, 0121 384 9921, withingtonk@familysearch.org

Borthwick Institute for Archives
University of York Library and Archives
Heslington,
York
YO10 5DD
www.york.ac.uk/inst/bihr
Contact: Sara Slinn, Office Manager, 01904 321160, sls6@york.ac.uk
or Chris Webb, Keeper of Archives, 01904 321161, ccw1@york.ac.uk

Oxfordshire Record Office, Heritage & Arts
St Luke's Church,
Temple Road
Cowley,
Oxford
OX4 2HT
www.oxfordshire.gov.uk
Contact: Carl Boardman, History Services Manager, 01865 398200), Carl.Boardman@Oxfordshire.gov.uk