Category Archives: Essex Ancestors

Change in Essex Ancestors subscription rates

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A message for those of you who are users of our online subscription service Essex Ancestors:

Last summer, for the first time since 2011, we raised most of Essex Ancestors’ subscription prices, but we were able to keep the basic 1-day subscription unchanged. We know that our customers appreciated it, but a rise is now essential for us to continue to provide the services that our customers want.

From Monday 8 June 2015 a 1-day subscription will cost £10 including VAT; all our other subscription prices will remain the same. For access to over 750,000 images of parish registers and wills we think that this still represents great value. Essex Ancestors will also remain free to view in the ERO Searchroom in Chelmsford and at the Archive Access Points in Saffron Walden and Harlow.

Don’t forget that our Reprographics Service can email you images of individual documents without subscription, even if the documents appear on Essex Ancestors. The first image of a document costs £2; later images of the same document cost £1.50 each.

Thank you for your ongoing support as we continue to develop Essex Ancestors by uploading ever more content for researchers to use and enjoy.

Major Essex Ancestors update: remaining wills now all online

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Essex Ancestors, our online subscription service which allows users to view digital images of historic parish registers and wills, has undergone its latest major update.

Our collections include about 70,000 original wills which date from the 1400s to 1858 – images of all of which are now available on Essex Ancestors.

Where wills exist, they can be of great help in establishing family connections and for finding out about people’s property and belongings.  As we have indexed the testators’ occupations and their places of residence as well as their names these images are also a goldmine for social and local history.

This is the third and final batch of the original wills that we have uploaded to Essex Ancestors and represents many months of work by our digitisers, conservators and archivists.

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This batch of wills included some extra large documents which had to be flattened in our Conservation Studio before they could be digitised

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The ERO Digitsation Studio has been hard at work preparing the latest upload

With all the parish registers and wills digitised, the total number of images on Essex Ancestors is now over 750,000. We hope that researchers all over the world will enjoy using this resource to find out about the lives of all the thousands of Essex people past who are included within these fascinating records.

A particularly ornate opening to a will belonging to John Gardener of Little Bromley (D/ACW 25/18)

A particularly ornate opening to a will belonging to John Gardener of Little Bromley (D/ACW 25/18)

You can access Essex Ancestors from home as a subscriber, or for free in the ERO Searchroom in Chelmsford or at our Archive Access Points in Saffron Walden and Harlow. Opening hours vary so please check before you visit.

Before you subscribe please check that the documents you are interested in exist and have been digitised by searching Seax. You can view a handy video guide to using Essex Ancestors here.

We will continue to add to and improve Essex Ancestors, so watch out for more material being added in the future. Happy searching!