Sharing and Publishing Wills (General)

by admin , Forest of Dean, Sunday, March 13, 2011, 08:35 (5009 days ago) @ mrsbruso

This is the same declaration used by the National Archives and many other County archives. The part that concerns us is:

(b) I will not use the copy except for my personal research or private study and will not supply a copy of it to any other person, persons or organisation.

My understanding is that they are referring to a copy of the original Will which they supply to you in an image or PDF format.

As most of us know copyright is a difficult subject to get your head around but as the copyright period for this type of document is for seventy five years after it is published, you can therefore transcribe the Will.

The way I see it is that if you transcribe the data within documents it is then acceptable to publish and share that transcript but not images of the documents themselves. In order to share the image of the document you would need to obtain permission of the owner of the the original Wills, which in this case is the Gloucestershire Archives.

We have numerous Wills on this Web site which have been transcribed from Wills held at Gloucestershire Archives so I do not see any obstacles if you were to transcribe the data of the Wills you are obtaining into a Word document and send them to us so they can be shared with others.

Disclaimer - The above are my personal opinions on the subject and may not be factual.