Welcome to Northamptonshire Wills

This site contains Wills of Northamptonshire for the period starting 1484, mainly for the parish of Sulgrave and surrounding parishes, concentrating on the surnames WATTS, and related families. Many more names are mentioned in these Wills and indexed.

Some Wills of other counties are also included.

The Wills are transcribed mostly from the Latter-day Saint (Mormon) films of Northamptonshire. Many Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) Wills have been downloaded from the National Archives Online site and then transcribed.

To make the Wills more readable, modern English spelling, where appropriate, has been used and therefore not letter perfect as originally written. There will be mistakes undoubtedly, especially where the Will has been damaged or where poor filming makes many words questionable. Add to that, the fact that early scribes were clearly not constrained by "correct" spelling. In some Wills, the same surname may be found with three or more different variations.

The Wills are presented here as a searchable database of 1449 entries; the main advantage of this is that it makes the search extremely fast. Although searching this database is similar to doing a GOOGLE™ search, it is different and therefore strongly recommend you visit the Instructions page first, to familiarise yourself with the best methods to take full advantage of the database.