Wills are so important for developing family trees in the earlier 16th and 17th centuries where parish records are often incomplete or missing.  This talk will discuss how wills fit in the context of estate planning, their importance to family historians, how the probate courts operated and use Geoff’s experience with Sussex wills to demonstrate online access. Finally, the common structure of early wills will be discussed to aid in transcribing the sometimes difficult writing, with a number of examples shown.

Presenter:
Geoff Barber

Geoffrey Barber (Western Australia) has been researching his English family history since about 1983. He maintains his family history web site www.nynne.org as a means of making his own research more widely available. In 2015 he published his own family history “Barber alias Nynne: 500 Years of Family History in Rotherfield, Tonbridge and Brighton” and in 2017 his “Manorial Records for Family Historians” was published by Unlock the Past. Geoff has also written many articles for journals and has given talks on topics such as manorial records, wills, tithe maps, DNA and 17th century merchant tokens. Geoff is a long-time member of the Sussex Family History Group and a strong supporter of their Wills Depository project which has over 16,000 Sussex wills transcribed and indexed. He has published several e-books based on wills and his interest in particular surnames in East Sussex. Wills are so important for developing family trees, particularly in the earlier 16th and 17th centuries. In recent times, Geoff has become a collector and researcher of 17th century merchant tokens issued in Sussex and Kent and has written articles and given talks on these. Geoff graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in physics and a Graduate Diploma in Computing.

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