Just wondered if anyone had experience of looking for wills in PRONI onmicrofilm - all pre-1900 wills are on microfilm. I tried looking for 4 wills the other day, 2 probated in Armagh and two in Belfast. The first one in Armagh was easy. The Armagh books have an index of names at the front and this gave me the number of the entry to look for. When I went there, there it was. No problem. The next one I looked for wasn't in the index. It was in the calendar book for the year, but not in the index on the microfilm. I should explain that the thing on the microfilm is a photo of a will book into which all the wills seem to have been copied (the writing in the
entries is the same for each) and there do not seem to be any pages missing (the pages are numbered. My question is is the entry just missing because it was never copied into the original will book or is something else going on here.

The Belfast registered wills were even worse. There is no entry in the Belfast books. In the 1895 book there was at least a little para at the end of each will giving the probate date and the wills seemed to be in probate date order. But my will (7 June) was just not there. Again was it just
never copied or is it somewhere else. In the 1899 microfilm the entries did not even have a probate date so there was no way of telling if you were in the right place. The thought of going through over 1000 wills which were mostly unreadable I found too daunting. Is there a trick to this I haven't realised? Or is it like most things in PRONI just too disorganised to
be useful.

David Quinn