Six Million British English & Welsh Wills 1861-1941 Going On Line

Following is an excerpt from a fascinating article dealing with various “famous folks” wills. Ancestry.co.uk is posting 6 million English & Welsh wills running from 1861 to 1941. If you do a Google News search, you’ll come up with all kinds of articles about this. However, this exceprt is from the best one I could locate online – from the August 11, 2010 edition of the Daily Mail.

He was the enemy of capitalism and the author of The Communist Manifesto, so perhaps it’s Contrasting fortunes: Karl Marx lived a largely hand-to-mouth existence in London until his death in 1883. His income came mostly in the form of handouts from his industrialist friend Friedrich Engels. He died leaving just £250 - about £9,000 in today's money. Charles Darwin was born into a wealthy and well-connected family i n 1802 and went on to lay the foundations for the theory of evolution. His estate was worth £146,911 when he passed away in 1882 - the equivalent of £13 million in 2010 not surprising that Karl Marx died with just £250 to his name.

Although the German-born philosopher would be worth £23,000 in today’s money, Marx’s estate pales into insignificance alongside other famous names on newly released online documents.

Author Charles Dickens was worth the equivalent of £7.1 million by the time he died, and Charles Darwin left an estate worth £13 million in today’s money.

The names are some of six million English and Welsh wills from 1861 to 1941 which will be available online, and the total worth of the 6,079,000 estates catalogued tops what would be £20 billion in today’s money.

Read the full article in the August 11, 2010 edition of the Daily Mail.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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