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Cost of wills going up

A

AlanB

LostCousins Member
I'm surprised that this hasn't been flagged on the forum before now.

From the 19th November 2025 the cost of ordering a copy of a will is increasing from £1-50 to £16. Yes sixteen pounds!

Get your orders in now.
 
I too spotted this from Monday 17th November. Wasn't sure if it was just a rumour! I've started a list....
 
I ordered 4 wills on 5th November and not received any response yet (apart from order receipt).
Does anyone have experience of turn around time? Or are they just swamped at present?
 
I've just received my first Will (in an order of 4) - 9 days delivery.
I have also placed a second order, so assuming the Order Nos are sequential, just under 10,000 orders have been placed in 8 days!
 
I ordeered one will last night and could not see any thing anywhere on their web site :mad: I may have missed it but if people are not Lost Friends friends or members of groups where the news has circulated how were they supposed to know about the increase? I just looked at the site to check my facts and it is in fact down for maintainance right now .
 
I ordered 5 wills on the 8th of November. Today I received an email telling that 1 was fulfilled and ready to collect. I keep trying but all I get is a notice that the site is down for maintenance and will be back soon. I assume the site is unable to cope with the number of people trying to collect their orders, sigh. How long do we have to collect them?
 
DavidF said:
I ordered 4 wills on 5th November and not received any response yet (apart from order receipt).
Does anyone have experience of turn around time? Or are they just swamped at present?
Click to expand...
I ordered 11 wills (including one direct ancestor that I didn't realize had a will!) and just got notice that one is available - however the site is down for maintenance so I am not sure when I will be able to collect it.
 
I have been trying to download a will this morning and lo and behold just after noon here in the UK I managed it. The site appears to be fixed for now.
 
The site has just come back for me this afternoon. I ordered 2 wills on Sunday night - very last minute! The one from 2016 came back instantly to my surprise. I assume it must have been ordered before...
 
peter said:
Friends received a special email from me on Tuesday.
Click to expand...
And before that we had advanced warning of a possible price increase in the 29th March newsletter.
Will prices go up? Many thanks for that useful warning. I put in 20 orders at that time.

One of the features of Lost Cousins that I find useful is the option to record having copies of birth, death and marriage certificates for our ancestors. Those records help with sharing copies when we make contact with new cousins.

Now that wills / grants of probate are such valuable documents can Lost Cousins help us to share them with our cousins? Would it be technically feasible to add a row on the "More" page with a box to tick for holding a probate document? Would members find that a useful addition?
 
Having saved £130.50 thanks to Peter. Yesterday I placed a new order at £16. My Order list shows new order is ready, but when I attempt to download it, I get an error. ‘HTTP/1.1 500 returned - please contact your administrator.’ I have reported the issue.

What is of more concern is that My Orders list shows my last order before today as being in April 2024. Having placed 9 orders just before 17th November 2025 at £1.50 only four of which have been fulfilled. I reported the missing orders, and got a reply to say that they were ordered under a different email address.

I checked with my other email address and the web site says its not recognised. I only kept a printed record of their order number for the first 5 orders so I must have received an email confirmation from them on my main email address.
Anybody else having issues?
 
I have not received a notification about my remaining 4 wills but I have just checked and there is 1 to collect. I had the same error message as you but it still downloaded .

I have only had one email for the probate site. Their site is clearly not functioning well.
 
I ordered mine on November the 8th and still have three outstanding. I think they are probably working their way through rather a lot of wills.

I wouldn't rely on an email notification that your wills are ready to collect. I check two or three times a week.
 
Thanks to Peter's flagging of the price increase I ordered 12 Wills, all during the week before the price increase deadline, under my own account with GRO. 8 of these became available within, say, 10 to 14 days, but then all seemed to grind to a halt. I continue to wait for the last 4 and suspect they will never arrive. My wife ordered two, under her own account and in the same timeframe, and only 1 arrived, at about the same time as mine. Two questions : 1. Does anyone else have the same issue ? 2. And I'd like to nudge them, but the link on the right of each order simply brings up a blank page, not a working messaging service. Does anyone know of a phone number or email address? Clearly now to be used after Christmas!
 
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