Urgent! Government wants to destroy wills!

[MissAppropriate]

i personally think that this would be a horrendous thing to happen. Consultation ends midnight today, please reply!

Title : Storage and retention of original will documents
Link : gov.uk/government/consultat...
Summary
A consultation on storage and retention of wills and other documents submitted in applications for probate.
This consultation closes at
11:59pm on 23 February 2024
i.e. it closes tomorrow!
Consultation description
At present all of the wills and documents submitted in support of probate (legal authority to manage larger estates of deceased persons) are preserved indefinitely in the original paper form. These records date back to 1858.
This consultation paper proposes a reform that will enable older wills and documents to be converted to a digital form and then destroyed, with the wills of famous persons preserved. Views are sought on the proposals from interested parties.

Thank you for that information. I have just responded.

I feel that the Society of Genealogists and other interested parties should have been more proactive in publicising this. It should have been in a banner across its home page, encouraging people to respond.

Ridiculous about preserving the wills of famous people, too, as who knows who'll be famous in the longer run! And if digital copies are so good, there's no need to preserve wills of the famous anyway!

I'm all in favour of digitisation of records. They can't keep piles of paper wills in storage forevermore.

Can’t see the problem if they digitize the old wills. Why does it matter?

Quote from an Englishancestors blog post

”However good the digital image, though, there is a difference between it and the original document. In archivist terms, it is only the original which is the ‘original document’. The digital images we mostly use via subscription websites or indeed the GRO’s online Wills and Probate service, are termed ‘surrogates’. There is always the possibility that part of a document is not included, that one page is blurred, that part of one page is missing, or that a few handwritten words on the reverse that might just be the clue to a mystery are not included. As all of us who work regularly with genealogy websites know, it could be months or years before such a problem is noticed. If the original exists somewhere this can be resolved. However, if the original has already been destroyed, valuable information is lost for ever.”

There is a Uk govt petition to sign launched by Richard Holt which closes in July 2024 if anyone is interested in signing.

But who is paying to preserve vast numbers of original wills for the benefit mainly of a handful of hobbyists?
Do you have to pay to access them?

I’m pretty sure it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to ensure all wills, when received by the Probate office, are scanned in full, ie both sides, with the pages numbered in some way. I mean, its not like the technology doesn’t exist!

Yes, you have to pay to access them.

And yes, the scanning technology exists, but isn't always used very well.

As far as I'm concerned, after the British Library cyber attack last year, which has still not been resolved, I have no confidence that the wills would be stored safely online, or even scanned correctly. (I know I got sent a partial will, where the second page had been omitted. This was resolved, as they still had the originals.)

consultation paper proposes a reform that will enable older wills and documents to be converted to a digital form and then destroyed,

we cant keep everything forever!

Yes, having used many digitised copes of documents, I can testify this is completely true.

Blurry, page missing, mislabelled, pages in wrong order, hard to identify which images are front and back of the same sheet of paper (a major problem for additional enclosures with letters or other documents, and can make it impossible to reconstruct the correct sequence of events).

Often the missing page is something the scanner thought was unimportant, but as the writer says, contains the vital clue which unlocks a mystery.

we cant keep everything forever!
Not forever maybe, but there are some wills dating back to 1384 at the National Archives 🙂

Also, IME a lot of scanning is made to fill the digital screen, with nothing to record the paper size. This turns out to be surprisingly important for piecing together or interpreting some documents.

Then there's types of paper, which can be used as additional dating evidence where other evidence is inadequate.

I've genuinely peered at scans and tried to identify paper types, to try to make sense of what was going on when the document was created.

For all these queries, the answer is to go back to the original.

And now this has made me wonder about paper and DNA testing. I wonder what the traces are like after 100 years – especially of licked stamps?

Can't see the issue with digitalisation of all wills then secure destruction after 50 years.

I strongly support digitising documents, and this being the primary means of access.

Storing the original documents somewhere not very accessible, fine. But destroying them completely, so there's no possibility of ever asking the archivist to resolve issues with the digitisation... that's drastic.