Origins

Origins.net pioneered the provision of web access to genealogical data, starting in 1997 with Scotland's official births, marriages and deaths records, in partnership with the General Register Office for Scotland. This was the UK's first governmental ecommerce service and the first time pay-per-view had been used on the web. The Origins approach to... this service has been followed by nearly all subsequent online services of this type. Origins has since specialised in providing access for the family historian to very rich but less well known and hard-to-get material, including apprenticeship records, poor law records and, especially, probate records. In 2010, in association with the British Record Society, Origins launched the National Wills Index (www.nationalwillsindex.com), a collaborative project to create a single, dedicated, online resource for pre-1858 probate material for England. The National Wills Index website, developed and hosted by Origins, is the most extensive online resource for English probate material, and contains indexes, abstracts and digitised images of probate documents from all over England.Read More