Probate Registry site's response to my feedback

[Rosinish]

Can I suggest you try the following search which may help you better understand the problems:

John Fowler Ross died 1989 Manchester - I am checking if he left a will.  I have no other information

I input surname Ross and christian name John plus year of death

Search tells me 176 pages have been found.  However - first page is BAIN & it then proceeds with other surnames starting with B - and onwards.  I asked for ROSS!! 

Can you explain how BAIN has become ROSS??  [/i]

My goodness Carole, that's some distance from your request & will be interesting to know the answer.

Why is it, when changes are made & they don't work, when people tell them 'the old system worked fine', they then tell us it didn't & give us a list of why it didn't work?

SP were the same, they took away search facilities which worked fine for us but now they're saying they didn't work 

There are many highly experienced Scottish researchers on RC who have never complained about the now defunct search options so who were the people who said there was a problem & how did they find this to be true when nobody on RC ever had a problem, in-fact the opposite as when the options were taken away, that's when the complaints began to roll in 

Annie

[Darnity]

I have now had a reply to my query to them on 5th March about 03 not being a valid month:

Dear customer,

As far as we are aware this has now been fixed.

Please retry and get back to us.

Kind Regards,

HMCTS Wills Helpdesk


I haven't got round to trying this one again but will do so.

On a more positive note I ordered 3 wills late afternoon on 11/05/22 and they were ready for me to download when I logged in the next day! They were recent 21stC wills though so they probably hold them digitised.

[melba_schmelba]

No nil finds but it returns too many searches totally outside the alphabetical request.  I have just sent this reply

Thank you for your reply

Can I suggest you try the following search which may help you better understand the problems:

John Fowler Ross died 1989 Manchester - I am checking if he left a will.  I have no other information

I input surname Ross and christian name John plus year of death

Search tells me 176 pages have been found.  However - first page is BAIN & it then proceeds with other surnames starting with B - and onwards.  I asked for ROSS!! 

Can you explain how BAIN has become ROSS?? 

Well, if I put in John Smith 1989, aside from the text list of wills/admons of various John Smiths, for the images, I get 274 pages starting at Abel !!

[acorngen]

I am glad i am not the only one with issues with the new search. Its dire and I have told them so.  Lets see what happens

[cuffie81]

Well, if I put in John Smith 1989, aside from the text list of wills/admons of various John Smiths, for the images, I get 274 pages starting at Abel !!

I have a theory about what they're doing. I think they've OCR'd and indexed every name & word on the pages and simply match the searched first and last name values against the indexed words for a given page, even if the values are on different probate entries. Basically, the search is by page and not probate record.

If you look at the images for your search I think you'll find there's a least one instance of "John" and "Smith" somewhere on each page.

Although this makes for a terrible search it does mean we can use the first and last name search inputs for any value, not just names, including addresses. For example, search for "Barkisland" and "Krumlin" in 1989; there's one matching page and the search values are part of a person's address. So there's some upside to their ineptitude.

[4b2]

I ordered several copies of wills and admons from the new site. Two with admons have come back with this reply.

Tank you for downloading a copy of the Grant of Letters of Administration from our records. We were unable to provide you with a copy of a will for the deceased. The reason for this is that the Grant that issued in this case is a Grant of Letters of Administration. This is a legal document issued by a Probate Registry when a person has died without making a valid will called intestate and is issued to an administrator of the estate. This is usually the lawful spouse if any, or nearest blood relative.

A quick search and reading on the site does not reveal the situation with admons.

Is it possible to order copies of them, when listed in the National Probate Index?

At my local archive they hold the will books for one probate court (1858-) but there are no admons included.

[Tickettyboo]

If the Probate Calendar says Administration then the person died intestate (did not leave a will). The Grant of Administration which the site has provided is the only document available.

Boo