Fran wrote: >Can anyone tell me how to obtain information for these wills: >GRANGER,Andrew,or Greanger,Srughavaddy Co Kilkenny 1794 >GRANGER,John,Shrughavada,Co Kilkenny 1786 <snip>Where may I send an inquiry or who can I contact? I'd love to see the >content of these wills. Until 1858 there were two systems of probate in Ireland, both under the administration of the Church of Ireland:- the Diocesan and Prerogative Courts. A will was proved in the Diocesan Court covering the area in which the deceased lived IF the deceased's property was entirely within that diocese. The relevant diocese for most of Co. Kilkenny is Ossory (it includes Kilmaganny parish). The will of someone having property of £5 or more in a second diocese was proved in the Prerogative Court. The original wills were destroyed in 1922 and only a small percentage of abstracts and transcripts survive, though 99.999% of pre-1800 prerogative wills are covered by the Betham will abstracts. The two Granger wills you refer to are NOT prerogative. I presume you got the references in Phillimore's Index to Irish Wills (which is a copy made by Gertrude Thrift of the manuscript indexes to diocesan wills for various dioceses, including Ossory). However, this just tells you that these wills existed prior to 1922. Determining whether a copy has survived is another matter. There is no one index to surviving will abstracts and transcripts; they're scattered through various collections in various record repositories. The bad news is that the two most likely collections DON'T contain copies of these Granger wills. These collections are Father Carrigan's (held in St. Kieran's College in Kilkenny & on microfilm at the National Library) and Edmund Walsh Kelly's (published in the Old Kilkenny Review 1988). Paul Gorry What's What in Irish Genealogy http://indigo.ie/~gorry