An archive of Spritual Court Records (1560-1635)

The Spiritial Court records contain details of testamentary court business (abstracts of wills, decrees, original wills etc.) as well as presentments and causes. Most of the surviving documents (which are held by Manx National Heritage) have been microfilmed. (At least) three boxes were omitted from this however - presumably due to the fragility of the source material. These three boxes include the two earliest sets of records (which predominately come from the latter sixteenth century) and one containing a mix of loose documents from the seventeenth century.

This subsection contains a digital version of the two early boxes referred to above. These digital images are presented in the same order in which they occur with the archive. Genealogists have a particular interest in the testamentary records (which for simplicity will be collectively referred to as wills). Consequently a rough index to the wills (etc.) appearing within this archive in also included, together with links to the corresponding image and (where appropriate) a transcription. There are about 1000 wills in this archive on which the large majority date from the 16th century. The microfilmed records contain around 15000 17th century wills, but no 16th century ones (with the possible exception of an occasional stray).

The form of handwriting used in these documents (and others of the period) can take considerable practice to learn to read. All of the (roughly 800) images in this section are very high resolution (typically around five mega-bytes in size) so as to permit a careful analysis. As a result they may take a little while to download on slower connections.

Acknowledgments

All of the images given within this subsection are photographs taken by myself of the original archive. They are included here by kind permission of Manx National Heritage.