Devon Wills Project

Contents & Search

When a person owning any kind of property dies without having made a will during his/her lifetime, then that person is said to have died intestate. The law then provides for such an event by the granting Letters of Administration to the next-of-kin or some other person who has to apply for these in order to administer the estate of the deceased. The law also provides for exactly how this estate is to be distributed amongst the next-of-kin or others and the Administrator has to do all of this in accordance with the current Administration of Estates Act.

If there is no next-of-kin or even if there is one, that person may not be willing to administer the estate. In that event then some other person, perhaps another relative or a creditor, has to apply for Letters of Administration in exactly the same way in order to settle the affairs of the deceased person. The Letters of Administration (Admons) granted by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (held in the PROB 6 Act Books at The National Archives) are very useful given the loss of all of the old Devon probates when Exeter was bombed in 1942. These identify not only the deceased but also their administrators with their relationship to the deceased be it widow (relict), child, friend or others.

The index below (JHA) is created from the listings of Devon-related Prerogative Court of Canterbury Administrations, prepared by Jean Harris for GENUKI/Devon (see http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/DevonAdministrations/), from the following volumes:

       Admins in PCC Vol 1 - Ed. R.M. Glencross 1559-1571 (LDS Film 0407935)
       Admins in PCC Vol 2 - Ed. R.M. Glencross 1572-1580 (LDS Film 0407935)
       PCC Administrations Vol 3 1581-1595 (Index Library 76)
       PCC Administrations Vol 4 1596-1608 (Index Library 81)
       PCC Administrations Vol 5 1609-1619 (Index Library 83)
       PCC Letters of Administration, 1620-1630 (J.H. Morrison, London, 1935)
       PCC Administrations Vol 6 1631-1648 (Index Library 100)
       PCC Administrations Vol 1 1649-1654 (Index Library 68)
       PCC Administrations Vol 2 1655-1660: A-F (Index Library 72), G-Q (Index Library 74), R-Z (Index Library 75)

Note: In many cases these volumes provide virtually all the information that can be gleaned from the original PROB 6 ledgers. Jean Harris's listings of the Devon entries in these volumes, as they appear in GENUKI in the Devon Administrations pages, contain most of this detail, and certainly contain more detail than it is possible to provide in this present 'JHA' index. Thus it is definitely worth consulting these listings to obtain further details of a particular administration, especially if the original Index Society volumes from which they are derived are not accessible.

(Copies of the above volumes should be available in the reference section of any large library of a major city.)

Note: No overall index is available to PROB 6 (PCC admons), though certain spans of years have been indexed by various different indexers. Thus our ACA index is a reformatted version of the Index of Prerogative Court of Canterbury Administrations 1750-1800 that was compiled by Anthony Camp.