Finding wills online is really quite straightforward once you know what you are doing. It doesn’t really matter what you need the will for, whether it be for a genealogy project or trying to establish whether or not a recently deceased relative has left a will, the procedure for finding wills online is broadly the same, but with some essential differences.

If genealogy is your reason for finding wills online then it is likely that the wills sought are not recent. Piecing together a family tree can involve searching through many wills online to glean tidbits of little known information about the individuals and about the family. This can be a very fascinating thing to do, but it is not the only reason why someone may search for wills online.

The most common reason why anyone searches for wills online is when a family member dies and no one can be sure whether or not they have left a will. A solicitor may hold the will, but if no one knows which solicitor to ask, the search can turn to a database where there are many wills online, and where there is a good chance of finding information about the missing will.

Wills online can provide an otherwise unknown glimpse into the past and the everyday life of those who lived long ago. For example, the county of Surrey has recently put over 28,000 wills online dating back to the 15th century and right up to the mid 19th century. These wills online are from ordinary people, albeit mostly those who were better off than the majority. The items left by the long forgotten in these many wills online include such diverse objects as old stockings, bees, hay and heaps of dung. Their value may not be much today, but in an earlier and less prosperous age they were worth passing on.

The National Wills Register is a good place to seek wills online. They do not hold the actual will, but if the will has been registered with them they will have the necessary details about the will and where it can be found. There is no guarantee of course that the will you seek is among the many thousand wills online that can be traced.

However, it is worth checking with the National Will Register, for even if they do not have details of the will, they can place the known relevant details of the deceased on the Missing Will notice board for up to a year. This is seen by solicitors and other legal experts looking through wills online on a daily basis.

It is inevitable that in this electronic and digital age we should become accustomed to searching for wills online, and not in some dusty archive repository. It also means that the search for wills online can be greatly speeded up as even a database of many tens of thousands can be accessed in seconds. We live in the information age. Wills online are rapidly becoming a part of that age.