Find your ancestors in Bank Of England Wills Extracts 1717-1845

Each record comprises a transcript and black and white image of the original register. The amount of information listed varies, but the records usually include a combination of the following information about your ancestor:

Transcript

  • First name(s)
  • Last name
  • Birth year
  • Entry year
  • Date
  • Place
  • County
  • Description
  • Record Type

Image

  • Marital status
  • Details of personal wealth
  • Executors’ names
  • Executors’ relationships to the deceased
  • Details of bequests
  • Death date

Discover more about these records

The Bank of England Wills Extracts contain extracts of wills of those who died with monies in public funds, as well as abstracts of orders made for stockholders who went bankrupt or were declared lunatic.

The monetary value of many of the stockholdings is often quite low. Investment in government funds was seen by many as an ideal vehicle for providing for their old age and as a repository for surplus earnings. This was particularly true of Londoners, immigrants and religious minorities although the stockholders, or fundholders as they used to be called, appear to come from every part of the British Isles and the Colonies. There are also several hundred Dutch fundholders.

The index is a finding aid to the original entries and not a source in itself but hard copies of extracts found via the index can be ordered online.

The registers from which this index was compiled were presented to the Society of Genealogists by the Bank of England in 1985. The registers are one of the most valuable sources for Georgian biographical and genealogical information to have become available in recent years.