Chancery Court Records for Family and Local History (504)
This course was previously called "Family Feuds – how to find and interpret Chancery court records" but has been renamed for clarity.
Chancery court records are some of the most underused, and yet useful, records that any family or local historian can use. They often contain details of several generations of a family, and will always distinguish between different people of the same name. They can recite long since lost property deeds, marriage settlements and wills. Accounts, lists of lands and values, and inventories of personal goods are often included as evidence. Reading a Chancery case will allow you to see people from the past as so much more than just names and dates. Perhaps most interestingly they let you into the secret lives, thoughts, passions, and feuds between family members.
The course will cover records from earliest times to the early 20th century, with an emphasis on the 17th and 18th centuries. Whilst some medieval cases are written in Latin, these will not be considered in detail here and a knowledge of Latin is not required for this course.
At the end of the course the student will have a knowledge of the type of records to expect, including the basic pleadings and also the peripheral records which often contain much additional information, what sort of information the records contain that can be useful to a family or local historian, where to find them and how to interpret them. The documents are all handwritten, but usually in a fairly clear hand, but students may want to improve their palaeography skills with our Old Handwriting for Family Historians course.
Set book:
There is a set book which accompanies this course. Students are asked to purchase Susan Moore's Tracing your Ancestors through the Equity Courts: A Guide for Family and Local Historians (Pen & Sword, 2017) before the course starts.
Reading List:
Students often ask us for recommended additional reading for their courses, that they can look at before the course starts. Here is a suggested book list for this course.
Lesson Headings:
- Introduction to Chancery records
- Chancery Bills and Answers
- Peripheral Documents – before 1800
- Peripheral Documents – after 1800
Relevant countries: England, Wales
What to expect:
Each lesson includes lesson notes, activities and forum exercises for students to complete during the week and a one-hour live tutorial (text chat or Zoom) with the tutor and the rest of the class. Times for the tutorials are set at the beginning of each course by the tutor.
This is an assessed course. The length of the course given is the number of teaching weeks but students should also allow time in the couple of weeks after the course ends to complete assignments.
Students said:
This course has been amazing. Susan is the top of her field when it comes to anything related to Chancery. I was particularly surprised to see how the lower classes were frequently mentioned in these cases. You never know what you might find! I didn't have much experience with Chancery records before this course, but now I feel comfortable understanding what records might be associated with a case and what they might reveal.
I am looking forward to researching Chancery records for my Pharos project. Thank you for all the time you have given to us and your wealth of knowledge.
- Tutor: Joe Saunders
- Length: 4 weeks
- Start date: Mon 26 Apr 2027