Free UK Genealogy, the charity behind the websites FreeBMD (for civil birth, marriage and death records), FreeREG (for parish registers) and FreeCEN (for census records), has announced plans for FreePRO, a website for probate records.
Denise Colbert, chief operating officer of Free UK Genealogy, said
the charity aims to digitise a set of 800 books of probate calendars,
dating from 1853 (shortly before the introduction of civil probate
registration in 1858) to 1943.
She also said that FreePRO would offer a more sophisticated search
option than on the government’s Find a Will website, allowing users to
search for points of entry such as the occupation of the deceased, the
value of the estate and the exact date of death.
Richard Light, the volunteer responsible for technical development of
the website, said the volumes would be transcribed using optical
character recognition (OCR), followed by human volunteers checking the
transcriptions.
Free UK Genealogy is currently looking at a tentative launch date of 2026 for FreePRO.
The charity is seeking to raise £40,000 to fund the initial digitisation of the books. An initial online crowdfunder has set a goal of raising £10,000 by the deadline of 5pm on Friday 29 August, with £2700 currently raised.
Denise Colbert said Free UK Genealogy is hoping to raise £10,000 in
pledges in the initial crowdfunding round, then £10,000 in match funding
from charitable initiative The Big Give’s Champion partners. It would
then seek to raise the rest of the money through The Big Give’s
Christmas Challenge fundraising campaign at the end of this year.
