How can I access a copy of my late father’s will?

Could you give me any information on how I could get a copy of my late father’s will?

He passed away 52 years ago and, unfortunately, due to family relations issues, I’m unable to ask my brother who inherited everything.

I’m not looking to dispute anything, only to clarify something that has arisen.

Mr S.C.

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The good news here is that there is no issue of contesting your father’s will. Good, I say, on two counts. One, it is always very depressing to read about families at odds over wills, especially of their parents. Second, on a more practical level, after 52 years, you are very far beyond the cut-off period for any such challenge.

More practically, from your point of view, it should be possible to access a copy of your father’s will as long as his estate went through probate because, at that point, it becomes a public document.

Your first step is to search for details of your father’s probate on the Probate Register website. All you need is his first name, surname and the year he died and, in my experience, as long as you have the surname and year of death, it will give you a list on anyone who might have died that year.

With surnames like yours, there are instructions on the website on how to search for Irish or anglicised forms of the surname and, of course, it is the form of the surname that your father used that is relevant here, not the one you choose to use.

Once you find your father’s record, it will show his name and surname, the address at the time he died as per the form filed for probate. It will also say when he died, who applied for probate, the date that it was granted and the type of grant – ie whether it was probate on the back of a will or whether the person died intestate.

Critically, it will also include a record number. This will start with four digits to mark the year probate was granted, then two letters to identify whether the grant was made through the main probate office in Dublin (PO) or in one of 14 regional offices, and, finally, a string of numbers.

When you have these details, for people where probate was granted in the past 20 years, you need to go back to the Probate Registry Online page and click on the hyperlink towards the bottom of that page which will download a copy of the Probate Office Order Form. If probate was granted before that – such as in your case – the records will be kept in the National Archives.

We’ll work through both as there will be other people interested in the process.

If working through the Probate Office order form, it will require the details you have culled from your search: your father’s name, address, his date of death, the Probate Office record number and when it was issued. It will also look for your name, address, email and phone number.

Finally, it will ask what document your require – ie an official copy of the grant of probate or the will, or both, or a sealed and certified copies of either or both. You’ll need to send that, together with the fee required – they range from €15 to €40 – to the relevant probate office that you will have identified from those two letters in the probate record. You can find the relevant addresses here.

If you are dealing with the main probate office in Dublin, the fee can be paid either via a cheque payable to the Courts Service or a money/postal order – no Revolut or online payment options here. If your record was processed at one of the regional offices, you are advised to check with them as to how they will accept payment. The link above gives relevant email addresses and phone numbers.

[ Will selling mum’s home while she is in nursing home complicate matters? ]

For more historic wills, such as your father’s, I gather you can get the document sent to you from the National Archives Office.

As you can imagine, with all the records in the archive, you’ll need precise details to identify the one document you want. The National Archives advise that for wills that were probated between 1922 and 1982, the easiest way to get those details is by using its simple search function for Calendar of Wills in the relevant year – eg Calendar of Wills 1972, or whatever.

Once you find your father’s record, you can fill in a testamentary copy order form with details of his name, address, the date he died, the date a grant of probate was issued, which office it was issued from and, if there is one, a reference number.

Again, as with the Probate Office, your details will be required plus details of which documents you want and the relevant fee payable to National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin 8, Ireland by cheque or postal order. The archives advise that it can take up to two weeks to get the document but, after all this time, I assume that won’t be an issue.

Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 24-28 Tara Street Dublin 2, or by email to dominic.coyle@irishtimes.com. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice