Ancestry's UK and Ireland Collection:
English medieval records and probate indexes



This is a draft listing of some of the source material in Ancestry's UK and Ireland Collection, which is available on the Internet as a subscription service. It includes most of the pre-1600 English material in the collection (but not parish registers or marriage licences) and all the probate indexes, as of 25 November 2001.

The list has been compiled from the brief details of the "Parish and Probate Records" databases for the English counties given on the Ancestry web site. Where possible I have added notes in [...] identifying the source of the records or clarifying what is covered. This has usually been fairly straightforward, as most of the records appear to come from printed editions, but I should stress these additional notes are mine, not Ancestry's. Where I haven't been able to identify the source, I have just taken the description from Ancestry's web site - I shall try to obtain more details of these records from them.

Note: To search for material in these sources, you have to use the main Ancestry search form (specifying the country as "England" if you want to exclude other countries). In the list of results, all the records below are categorised - somewhat misleadingly - as "Birth, Marriage & Death Records". Within that broad category, they appear in county databases, with names of the form "[County name], England: Parish and Probate Records". The results for each county will contain data from parish registers, marriage licences and other post-medieval records, together with extracts from the sources below.


Contents:


Public records

(1) Land taxes and feudal surveys

(2) Inquisitions post mortem

(3) Pipe rolls

(4) Taxation and other lists

(5) Common law records

(6) Feet of fines

(7) Chancery and other equity suits

Charters

Manorial records

Probate records

Funeral monuments

Church records and religious houses

Heralds' Visitations and the College of Arms

Miscellaneous

(1) Urban and guild records

(2) Schools, Universities and Inns of Court

(3) Other