An index to the wills

The following is a rough index of the names of the deceased corresponding to those wills, abstracts of wills and decrees found within this set of ecclesiastical court records. (For simplicity these are collectively referred to as wills.) The source archive is two boxes of manuscripts held at the Manx National Heritage Library. The index contains about 1000 names. The vast majority of these correspond to the abstract of a will, although in a small number of cases only an inventory or the death of date is given. The names can be hard to read and are sometimes missing or obscured. I estimate the index to only be 80-90% correct. It should however be virtually complete.

The records indexed here were not microfilmed and were previously only accessible by consulting the original source documents. To the best of my knowledge they are not contained within any pre-existing indexes (which have tended to be microfilm based).

The index is ordered according to the position of the wills within the archive. The first column gives the label of the folder within which the will appears (but is not necessarily a precise indication of the date of the record). The second column is my attempted transcription of the name. The third and fourth columns provide links to the image and (if one exists) to a transcription of the will. I would welcome any new transcriptions or corrections to the index.

The information given in brackets following the name is a folio number assigned by me. (The original manuscript doesn't contain page or folio numbers.) This is followed by L or R to indicate the left or right page. Where the parish or year is clearly indicated then I have also included it. Women are typically listed by their maiden name, but where the married name is obvious from the will then I have added it to the index. For example if I happened to notice that Jane Doe's will mentioned her husband John Smith then I would write Jane Doe now Smith in the index. Surnames are commonly prefixed by mac or ine which indicate son of and daughter of respectively.

All of the images here are provided by kind permission of Manx National Heritage.