On 28/12/14 10:53, Chris Pitt Lewis via wrote: > > On 28/12/2014 00:52, Charles Ellson via wrote: >> On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 10:38:22 +1100, "Andy" >> <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> Currently they are not available instantaneous but up to 10 working days >>> after ordering online >>> >> So for all practical purposes it is the existing system with online >> ordering now available. All we need now is someone's pet MP to table a >> question asking why they charge a tenner while the Scottish Government >> only charges roughly a quarter of that for online wills (to 1925) and >> some other governments don't charge at all. >> > > Because the service is operated by the inefficient and unimaginative HM > Courts & Tribunals Service, which thinks it can make money out of us, > but couldn't cope with the rush if it offered it at a price family > historians could afford. > > The real question is why on earth the Courts Service is allowed to keep > control of probate material more than say 50 or 100 years old, instead > of handing it over the the National Archives. They have form on this of > course - it wasn't until 1970 that they handed over the records of the PCC. AFAICS they've digitised the index but not the documents. The wills are being retrieved by hand and scanned to order so the price covers that cost. TNA do much the same thing with a lot of documents - and charge - and I've seen some pretty low-res scans come from them; will this lot do better, I wonder. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Ian Goddard <[email protected]> wrote: > AFAICS they've digitised the index but not the documents. Not very substantially as far as I can see. Unlike Ancestry who have transcribed the names on the pages, this new site seems just to indicate which pages a name *should* appear on it if it is there. So, for example, for my Cavers one-name study I get lots of spurious positive results, with very few actual Cavers entries, whereas Ancestry just tells me the ones that are really there. I'm boggling at this as supposedly a revolutionary service, and am quite annoyed by the claims that millions of wills have been put online. Hardly. They haven't even done the indexes properly as far as I can see, never mind the wills which are being scanned, individually, on demand as customers buy them. Very different from the totally online and instantly downloadable Scottish wills website. Viv