A crowdfunder has been started to raise money for a new website offering free transcriptions of UK probate records.
Free UK Genealogy, the charity behind the websites FreeBMD (for civil birth, marriage and death records), FreeREG (for parish registers) and FreeCEN (for census records), has announced plans for FreePRO, a website for probate records.
Denise Colbert, chief operating officer of Free UK Genealogy, said the charity aims to digitise a set of 800 books of probate calendars, dating from 1853 (shortly before the introduction of civil probate registration in 1858) to 1943.
Richard Light, the volunteer responsible for technical development of the website, said the volumes would be transcribed using optical character recognition (OCR), followed by human volunteers checking the transcriptions.
“We are trying to keep very close to our slogan of ‘Human transcription for family history data’”, Denise Colbert said. “We feel like that’s something that sets us apart from the bigger boys. It’s always a human that has eyes on the record before it’s published. While we are using OCR to process these images, each record will have had eyes on it by a transcriber who knows what they’re doing and tidies each record up. I think that’s quite topical in this age of AI.”
She also said that FreePRO would offer a more sophisticated search option than on the government’s Find a Will website, allowing users to search for points of entry such as the occupation of the deceased, the value of the estate and the exact date of death.
Free UK Genealogy is currently looking at a tentative launch date of 2026 for FreePRO.
The charity is seeking to raise £40,000 to fund the initial digitisation of the books.
An initial online crowdfunder has set a goal of raising £10,000 by the deadline of 5pm on Friday 29 August, with £2600 currently raised.
Denise Colbert said Free UK Genealogy is hoping to raise £10,000 in pledges in the initial crowdfunding round, then £10,000 in match funding from charitable initiative The Big Give’s Champion partners. It would then seek to raise the rest of the money through The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge fundraising campaign at the end of this year.
Free UK Genealogy is also seeking corporate donors, particularly businesses that use probate and businesses that serve an older demographic. The charity will offer rewards for corporate donors that include promoting them on its campaign pages, emails, newsletter and social media accounts.
