Ancestry place search for wills is useless - use National Archives instead!

[Gadget]

It should be mentioned that PCC wills do not cover all the pre-1858 wills.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/wills-or-administrations-before-1858/


Added - an introductory quote in above guide;

Most people who left a will used the appropriate church court. The Prerogative Court of Canterbury was the highest church court in England and Wales until 1858, when the national court was established, but even in the late 1850s it was only proving about 40% of the national total of 21,653 wills.

Most of the wills that I've accessed have been either Welsh or from individual Dioceses.

[andrewalston]

The lack of wildcard searches in placenames became a real problem on ALL their datasets when the "new search" was imposed by Ancestry a few years ago.
Placenames were changed from a "search" field to a "lookup" one.
Unless the placename in the transcription exactly matches the entry in Ancestry's gazetteer, there is no match.
Census entries, for example, often quote large cities, such as Birmingham, without mentioning the county. Because the only lookup is for "Birmingham, Warwickshire, England", there can be no match.
The problem becomes intolerable where Ancestry's gazetteer is plain wrong. It claims that Tower Hamlets is in Kent for example. The "inferred county" for BMD registrations is often wildly inaccurate. They've improved it a bit, but "Isle of Wight" was, according to Ancestry, in Oxfordshire. Now it is in "Oxfordshire, Isle of Wight, Hampshire, Berkshire". They have no concept that administrative areas such as "Avon" and "West Midlands" can not be applied to records before 1974. However, I know that they list George Washington as being born in the "United States of America" in 1732, so we are not alone in suffering.

[melba_schmelba]

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to search for PCC wills using Ancestry’s index, when there is a far superior index at TNA Discovery. This is free to use and can be searched by personal names, place-names, occupations etc. Enter the reference code PROB 11 to restrict the results to PCC wills. From the findings there, it’s usually possible to transfer enough data to Ancestry to locate the images. If not, it can often be done by browsing, with reference to the date/quire number etc., as has been shown in other RC threads.

In any case, some individual pages of PCC wills are completely missing from Ancestry. In cases where the first page of a will is missing, the item won’t appear at all in Ancestry’s index, no matter how hard you search for it there.

Yes, absolutely agree, I have for years checked first on National Archives Discovery Search, using this page which has a form for all the fields

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/wills-1384-1858/

As my first post indicates generally you get more matches on there whether you are searching by surname or place as their transcription quality is far better, and is not restricted by lack of wildcard search, also occupation, titles and other details are often included that are not on ancestry. When there has been a will that showed up on TNA but not Ancestry, more often than not I've been able to find it on Ancestry using wildcards in the name, but there has been one or two that I've needed to purchase - I purchased many when they were first only available on TNA so I think I've donated my fair share !

[melba_schmelba]

My apologies in advance for this    BUT why would anyone be searching for Wills by location, rather than by name? 

When searching for ancestors from the C16th and C17th who did not leave wills (but I know should exist), I have frequently read all the the wills from their own and nearby villages in the period of their probable lifetime.

Many times I have found the ancestor mentioned as an executor, overseer, appraiser, witness or (less often) legatee.  That alone makes it worth doing.

It hasn't happened yet, but one day I hope to read a mention of "my daughter/granddaughter [married surname]" to identify one of my missing ladies.

Bookbox has made the significant point.  Do all your PCC searches in TNA Discovery, then use the details to find the will in Ancestry.

Yes I've done exactly the same thing, going through all the wills for a village between a certain limited date range to try and locate wills that mention people as brother/sister/daughter/son when marriages are missing.

[melba_schmelba]

The lack of wildcard searches in placenames became a real problem on ALL their datasets when the "new search" was imposed by Ancestry a few years ago.
Placenames were changed from a "search" field to a "lookup" one.
Unless the placename in the transcription exactly matches the entry in Ancestry's gazetteer, there is no match.
Census entries, for example, often quote large cities, such as Birmingham, without mentioning the county. Because the only lookup is for "Birmingham, Warwickshire, England", there can be no match.
The problem becomes intolerable where Ancestry's gazetteer is plain wrong. It claims that Tower Hamlets is in Kent for example. The "inferred county" for BMD registrations is often wildly inaccurate. They've improved it a bit, but "Isle of Wight" was, according to Ancestry, in Oxfordshire. Now it is in "Oxfordshire, Isle of Wight, Hampshire, Berkshire". They have no concept that administrative areas such as "Avon" and "West Midlands" can not be applied to records before 1974. However, I know that they list George Washington as being born in the "United States of America" in 1732, so we are not alone in suffering.

Yes you sum up the problem well. I had suspected it applies to all datasets, and it seems it does. Presumably there was some criticism directed towards ancestry when they did this but they've failed to do anything to remedy it. It is a double whammy restriction - they restrict your ability to find places by limiting to their strictly standard spelt places and to the region they often wrongly say those places are in, and they have stopped us using wildcards to find old placename spellings.

And there is an additional impact in that these records with old placename spellings are in no mans land so you will not find them, say, by doing a search by county, or even country.

[coombs]

I feel Ancestry is going downhill faster and faster now. The site is next to useless now, and I may reconsider my sub next year if this carries on. I use TNA for will searches anyway.