Saturday, November 7, 2009

190,000 Welsh Wills Online

The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com.

The BBC recently published an article about the end of a five-year project to make 190,000 wills available online has been completed. The project is complete and the wills are available now. About 800,000 pages of documents have been placed on the National Library of Wales' website.

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth said the wills dated from the 14th Century until 1858, when civil probate was introduced, and 1,000 of them were written in Welsh.

It said the project was "good news for family historians, social historians…and the inquisitive".

You can read more at the BBC web site at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/8316533.stm and on the National Library of Wales web site at http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=1514&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=2640&tx_ttnews[backPid]=2&cHash=adbaf61688.

The wills are available http://cat.llgc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gw/chameleon?skin=profeb&lng=en.

My thanks to Michael Kinsey for telling me about this resource.

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