Surrey Will Abstracts 1470-1856

Surrey Will Abstracts are available to British Origins or Total Access subscribers only. If you are a current subscriber, click here to login. If you are not a current subscriber, click here to learn more and sign up. Logged in users, click here to search the collection.

This extraordinary collection is one of the most valuable on British Origins. It contains fully indexed abstracts of every Surrey will known to still exist, over 28,000 of them, dating from the 15th to 19th centuries; nearly all the originals are held at the London Metropolitan Archives.

The abstracts include all personal names (testator, beneficiaries, executors, witnesses, overseers, and others) with their relationships, place names, occupations, monetary and other bequests, and descriptions of lands. The indexes include the names of every person mentioned - over a half of a million names - places mentioned (many outside Surrey), subjects (eg occupations) mentioned in the wills, and of dates.

Many wills contain rich details of the testator's property, providing a more detailed picture of how your ancestors lived than almost any other genealogical resource. Even if you don't find one of your own ancestors in these records, by searching on date and occupation you may find people living at the same time and in similar cicumstances as your ancestors, so giving you an impression of how your predecessors lived.

Many wills provide sidelights on the relationships between the people mentioned - with the testator expressing clear dislike or distrust of other family members. See example SW/7_865.

Other wills give an indication of general preoccupations of people at a particular time in history. See example SW/7_917

This resource, then, is not just for the genealogist wishing to add more names to their family tree. It is unique resource for researching social history within one English county over a period of five hundred years.

We would like to express our own thanks to Cliff Webb, for having created one of the most valuable secondary sources anywhere for research into English social and family history.

View more detailed information about this dataset


Try a Free British Origins search to view results