A crowdfunding campaign is seeking donations to help pay for a new website to transcribe probate records.

UK-based charity Free UK Genealogy, which runs websites FreeBMD (civil birth, marriage and death records), FreeREG (parish registers) and FreeCEN (census records), has announced that it is planning to create a new website, FreePRO, to host free transcriptions of probate records.

CEO Denise Colbert said that the charity is looking to digitise a collection of 800 volumes of probate calendars, which date from 1853 (a year before civil registration of probate was introduced, in 1858) to 1943.

Richard Light, who is leading the project and volunteers to handle technical aspects of website development, said the 800 volumes would be transcribed using optical character recognition (OCR), before being checked by human volunteers.

“We are trying to keep very close to our slogan of ‘Human transcription for family history data’”, Denise Colbert said. “We feel like that’s something that sets us apart from the bigger boys. It’s always a human that has eyes on the record before it’s published. While we are using OCR to process these images, each record will have had eyes on it by a transcriber who knows what they’re doing and tidies each record up. I think that’s quite topical in this age of AI.”

Denise Colbert also said that FreePRO will offer a more flexible search facility than the government’s Find a Will website, allowing searches on points of entry such as the deceased’s occupation, the value of the estate and the date of death down to the exact day and month.

Free UK Genealogy is currently eyeing a tentative launch date of 2026 for FreePRO.

The charity is aiming to raise £40,000 to pay for the initial digitisation of the 800 books.

An initial online crowdfunder set a target of £10,000 to be reached by a deadline of 5pm on Friday 29 August, and has so far raised £2600.

Denise Colbert said the aim for the initial crowdfunding round is to raise £10,000 in pledges, then to raise a further £10,000 in match funding from charitable initiative The Big Give’s Champion partners. The charity would then try to raise the remaining money through The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge fundraising campaign at the end of the year.

Free UK Genealogy is also actively seeking corporate donors, especially businesses that use probate records, and those that have an older demographic in their customer base. Rewards offered to corporate donors include promotion on campaign pages, emails, newsletters and social media accounts.