Problems with the probate website

I have now managed to login in & reset my password, however:
1) initially I couldn't reset because I had 'an outstanding reset request' - luckily the 1 hour reset sent on 8th Feb was still valid.
2) they seem to have a very restricted list of 'special characters', several of my selections were rejected until I hit on one that worked. They need to give us more information, ie which special characters are acceptable?

I've ordered 3 wills, let's see if they arrive - fingers crossed.

 

Following my last message:
I haven't received any email confirmation of my order.
And, there are NO lists on their website of either my current orders or my previous orders - there are no links for accessing anything like that.

 

I had orders for 5 wills outstanding when the site was taken down. While it was down I got notifications that 3 of them were ready to download. As previously posted I couldn't get into "My Account" on the new site up to yesterday. Just tried again for the first time today and I've got in, and 2 of the 5 ordered wills are there. One is from the two that I haven't had notification for - that is now marked ready to download. The other which I had the available to download email for on 25 January now shows as documents pending. I'm thinking, apart from any other issues, they opened the new site while they were still uploading, and that is still in progress. I'll see if the other three ordered appear in the next couple of days.

 

Dave Annal has posted a helpful nine minute video at This shows how to negotiate your way around this very clunky site. Very little is intuitive but it is possible find things and place an order, provided you know how. Someone needs their knuckles rapped for even presuming to think that this new site was ready to go live.

 

Yesterday I received the email saying that the will I had reordered on my new account was ready so with trepidation I went through the log in and ignored all the banners that say "page not found" " accept cookies" I finally was able to download the will I was waiting for, actually I got two copies and I am sure I only clicked the button once. Sadly in my case it was not worth the wait and did not add anything to my knowledge, but at least I got it.

 

Yes indeedit was counter intuitive! If you click on the page image that shows up for a pre 1996 will in order to magnify it, the order panel comes up at the side.

 

Not my current area of interest, but my local BMSGH Family History Group on Facebook raised the subject of problems with the Probate Search Website and provided a YouTube link to a video from a professional family historian. It covers many of the problems with the site and I found it quite interesting and informative, as I am sure will others. So here is the YouTube link (and here I am copying from another screen, so hope it works)

 

Carol what I noticed is whereas we were used to the grant and the will being separate files now, although one file has a g suffix and the other a w suffix, both provide copies of the grant and the will. Whether that's a deliberate change or another teething problem time will tell.

 

That's interesting, Kevin! I think they may still be in a muddle regarding this. I clicked on the download button and got two files with separate (Do you want to save)-type messgaes, but they were actually different as we were used to - the "g" one had the grant and the "w" one had the will. This was for a will that I had ordered (and downloaded) just before the site changed so it may well be different for newly ordered wills of course

Still waiting for the rest of my previously ordered wills from that particular batch to arrive though - I got the emails on 25th Jan saying they had been delivered but they show as pending in the list of orders. No other orders appear anywhere (yet???)

 

I went back and looked at the two copies and realised I have two copies of the grant page and not the will itself so I used the contact us button to the right and sent them an email.

 

Having failed to find any entry over a wide range of years for a fairly uncommon spelling that I have page images for, I experimented with a few pages and the only enrties that would return the pages were the 1st and last entry on a page.
Though it will find entries with only a few letters entered, it does not always show all relevant entries, to see them all you need to add * to the end. A test looking for an 'LAR ' starting name in 1860 the pages found were - L =5 , L* =293 , La =7, La* =87, Lar =7, Lar* =7 and in 1895 L =3, L* =115, La =3, La* =30, Lar =3, Lar* =3
With the minimal indexing and random order of the returned pages, if the initial character sequence is unusual then a lot more pages will have to be viewed to find if an entry is there!

 

I always got an order confirmation email which listed which wills I had ordered and the cost before the website went down, but I did not get an email confirming my order on the new website.

 

I haven't ordered any new wills as I'm waiting for things to settle down. However, I now have 8 in my "My Orders" tab but the only ones that are available to download are 2 I already downloaded before the site died on the 25th January. None of the others are available, despite having had emails saying they are ready. They are clearly working on the site but I think there is quite a way to go yet!

 

Tried my account earlier this morning and couldn't get past the email address screen - kept getting an error message. Just tried again and not only got in but my "missing" pre closedown order is now there which seems to reinforce that patience is the name of the game.

As others have mentioned there have been no email notifications of orders made (I've done one post re-opening) or delivered, and remains to be seen if there will be warnings as the access deadline appears. While it may just be another area where patience is all that's needed I'm going to provide feedback as to how useful those features were.

 

This morning, I received a confirmation of my order from 3 days ago - but - it only gives the order number and order date, no details of the wills ordered or cost.
I've checked the website and there is now an option for showing my orders. It shows details of the 3 I ordered last week, one of which is available for download - I have had no notification that it was ready. I've downloaded it successfully, though it is only the Will - I have usually received the Grant as well - is this the new normal?

I've found that I have another tab with a connection to the hmcts site - what is weird is that, even with a refresh, it is still showing the information as it was when the system collapsed last week. ie 1 item in my basket and logged out. Probably something to do with cookies, but other sites would refresh to the current state.