Family Historian User Group

I'm going through some of my Ancestry England & Wales Probate Calendar images and replacing them with better copies from FMP.

The Ancestry images appear to be scans of the original bound copies, and many of them are rather poor quality, with poor contrast and heavy skewing due to the thickness of the volumes. Early ones are cropped, but not later ones.

By comparison, the FMP images (which seem to be the same as those available directly from the Probate Registry website) are generally much better contrast, and properly square. They may not be quite as sharp (some can look like a good quality fax image), and many appear to be working copies, with numerous hand-written annotations, while others are clean with no additions. Some are even negative images.

The following pair are typical - no prizes for guessing which one I'm using! Does anybody know where the Probate Registry / FMP images come from?

I'd never noticed that...

Personal Rant Warning - I have to say that I really dislike the higher contrast image from FMP. The results aren't that bad here but where the image is a lower quality original, the intermediate greys get wiped out in an arbitrary manner resulting in broken lettering or specks of dirt becoming enormous. (Even here you say that there is a loss of sharpness - not significant, I'd say but it's there). There are plenty of cases where the increased contrast makes stuff illegible - I had to get a revised copy of a WW1 RAF service record from TNA because the downloaded version was plain illegible due to excessive contrast. TNA sent me a natural contrast image. Guess what - no issues reading it... Somebody please tell TNA we can usually cope with file sizes that won't fit on a floppy disk!

So personally I prefer the Ancestry images - just to be awkward!

But what's really interesting to me is the annotations such as "Resworn" comments. That might suggest the copies came from a probate office...?

Rant 2 - FMP's Probate Calendar collection is called England & Wales Government Probate Death Index 1858-2019. Their browse of that is called England & Wales Probate Calendars 1858-1995 Browse. So if you search on "Calendar", you find one but not the other... Consistency?

Some are even negative images. ....

Does anybody know where the Probate Registry / FMP images come from?

No, but I too have been puzzled that some of them are negative images. It gives the impression the collection has been compiled from a variety of sources.

On the Probate Registry website https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/#calendar there is a Feedback button at the bottom which leads to an email address HMCTSWills@ironmountain.co.uk and subject title Find a Will feedback. It might be worth enquiring there.

Like Mark, I generally prefer FMP for probate images, but I flit between FMP and Ancestry for census and BMD index images in order to find the best one for inclusion in reports etc. Ancestrys census images are often better than FMPs but I dislike the way Ancestry colours 1911 census images. No idea where the probate images come from though.

One can search probate on National archves.
I downloaded a copy of my in laws probate from here
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/hel ... fter-1858/

AFAIK, National Archives is just a link to the Probate Registry site, which seems to use the same image set as FMP (in fact, FMP is probably a copy of the Probate Registry database).

BTW, it can be somewhat tiresome going through some of the images on the Gov.uk site since they updated their web page.

The team there, suggested I use the " " in the Surname and first name fields.

Something like :

"Smith
Harold"

However, for the early years say, 1900 - 1920ish,I found it was best to leave the " " out.
Hope this helps.

I have a vague memory that Ancestry initially sourced their images from one of the London FHS's which had somehow got hold of either a set of index books or films of the same, but I can't remember the exact details (if I ever knew them).

AdrianBruce wrote: ↑

06 Mar 2023 17:26

<SNIP>
Rant 2 - FMP's Probate Calendar collection is called England & Wales Government Probate Death Index 1858-2019. Their browse of that is called England & Wales Probate Calendars 1858-1995 Browse. So if you search on "Calendar", you find one but not the other... Consistency?

I too have noticed inconsistencies between the collection name and the actual image set. When citing, I go with what I see on the image set. It is frustrating, but I keep reminding myself that in my case, the frustration still costs me far less than flying to England from Canada each week to look up records!

Up until about the mid-20th century, I've stayed with the Ancestry images. Where there is a colour cast or grey background, this is easily removed with IrfanView to give a neater appearance in reports. Mid-20th century is a mix, but later Ancestry images seem to be relatively poor by comparison with the older ones. In particular, some of the fiche copies are verging on the unreadable. I do remember that they have been added to the site in batches, so later ones are clearly from different sources.

Probate Registry / FMP definitely have the edge for me in the later years. Yes, they are not as sharp, but neither are they weirdly distorted or covered in specks!

Picking up Teresa's point, I have a number of old typed transcripts in my files from visiting London in the pre-internet age and heaving the bound volumes off the shelves!

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

07 Mar 2023 16:00

... Probate Registry / FMP definitely have the edge for me in the later years. Yes, they are not as sharp, but neither are they weirdly distorted or covered in specks! ...

Yes - I'm looking at a 1980 Calendar page and I can see what you mean. I can tell that the Ancestry and FMP versions are not from the same original as there are subtle differences in the typeface. (Or not so subtle if you're like me...)