Some East Ilsley Wills

Transcription of particular Wills adds another dimension to the work on Monumental Inscriptions of East Ilsley. The MIs project developed to include details of the deceased, gleaned from parish registers, census returns and other documents, which have in some cases has resulted in mini biographies of certain families and individual inhabitants who have dwelt in East Ilsley over the centuries. All 46 Wills transcribed to-date are of people who have a known grave in East Ilsley churchyard or are closely related to someone buried there. The transcriptions are arranged chronologically according to when the will was made rather than when it was proved. The Testators are given their grave numbers where applicable.

It took patience to decipher the two to three hundred year-old scripts, a task made more difficult due to the fact that no punctuation is used. One could not be sure, either, whether particular letters were capitals or not. The printouts from microfilm, or downloaded from the Internet, vary in quality. This adds to the difficulty in deciphering them.

Some of the surnames mentioned in the wills are:

Adnam Adnams Allin Arnold Ashcomb Awbery Baker Banbury Barnes Barrett Bartholomew Barton Beckett Bew Blackaller Blackaller, Blake Blathway Body Bonham Bour Bower Bowles Boyes Brainston Brown Bryant Budd Bunny Butler Campbell Cannons Church Clark Clarke Clifford Coke Collier Commins Cottle Crafe? Crosby Crossley Crowdy Dale Darling Day Deacon Doe Downs Eagles Eustace Evans Ferris Field Francis Franklin Frogley Fuce(?) Fuller Gegg Gibbs Godden Godfrey Goodacre Goodall Goodlake Graham Greenwood Gunning Halford Hall Hambleton Hamblin Hammond Hanslow Harris Hawkes Head Hewett Hignell Holdrop Horner Howard Hugget Hughes Hulbert Hunt Jardine Jarvis Jervis Kempster Keys Kimber King Kislingbury Lanham Liddiard Line Lloyd Loveday Lovelock Mallam Martin Mathews Mawson Miller Mortimer Murley New Newbury Newton Norton Palmer Pile Pocock Pottinger Poynter Pumphrey Quince Ralph Rawlins Rayner Reaveley Rudd Rumble Selfe Sellwood Seymour Sheen Slater Smallbones Smith Snoswell Stanmore Steptoe Stevens Stinson Stroud Stute Sussex Tancred(?) Tanner Tayler Taylor The Thorne Tull Turk Twycross Waite Wakefield Webb Wells Westland Weston Whiting Whittiche Wicks Wilder Wilkinson Williams Willis Wilton Winkfield Winterbourne, Young

 

"I Give and Bequeath unto my said son William Blackaller my Silver Tankard my Cocoa Nut Shell cup with a Silver foot and Silver mounted and also two Silver Spoons marked W.B.A. to and for his own use" West Andrew Blackaller 1778

The Society has published a booklet, which contains a full index  of the names mentioned in the wills together with cross-references to known graves.  The index shows not only the Testator, but also Executors, Beneficiaries, and others mentioned in passing. The full transcripts of these first 46 wills are also available on a CD (Note: these 46 wills are also included in the new CD of 190 wills)

On-going research on wills

The work of transcribing the wills of East Ilsley people (not just those who are commemorated in the churchyard) is an on-going project. A total of 190 wills have now been identified and transcribed, including many that pre-date the beginning of parish registers. 

Indexing of these additional wills is now complete. The transcripts run to over 300 pages, so they are available as a CD version which contains full transcripts of the wills, summaries of the people mentioned (beneficiaries, witnesses etc.) and a full name index.

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Last modified: 10/21/14