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For Deanery of Shoreham wills:

Ref1:: Prs/w - reel & folio of will register; "AB" for Act Book entry only.
Ref2:: day and month

For PCC wills and those proved in the Commissary Court of London:

Ref1:: register
Ref2:: folio

Additional information

Notes

The first item in this column is occupation or equivalent (e.g. widow, gent.); where none is known, "m;" (man) or "w;" (woman) is given.

In text file	On web page	Means
[Trans/JF]		Jean Fox has a transcript
[Extract]		Jean Fox has a partial transcript
[Curiosity]		[Interesting items from Wills] makes a reference to this will

Surname search

For surname searching the index is split into sections alphabetically. Click on the first letter of the name below to display a section, then search the text for the name you want. If you can't find the name then check in the list of aliases.
Warning:Some these pages are BIG! (See below for how to download the whole lot in compressed form.)
The index contains

Surname
Forenames
Parish
Dates of death / probate
Indexing
Notes often including occupation

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

List of aliases

If the name you're looking for is not found in the alphabetical section then consult the list of aliases which might direct you to another section. This might be a matter of different spellings or alternative names for the same person

Extracting wills related to a place

If you're interested in a particular place then you need to download the complete compressed text file and extract the lines matching your subject. (This is dealt with in the next section.) For example suppose you wanted to list wills relating to Seal in date order then (once you've downloaded and uncompressed the complete text file) you could use the following DOS command to produce a file called sealw.txt:
find " Seal" wills.txt | rpsort /+91 >sealw.txt

Downloading the complete index

The 19,000 entris makes for a large file that is rather too big for convenient display on a single web page. Furthermore if you have a text file you can look at it in many different ways. Therefore if you want to use the index for anything other than searching by surname you'll want to download the compressed version then uncompress it ready for use.

Read this if you don't use Windows/DOS

The detailed instructions that follow are for DOS(Windows) users. If you use another operating system you can still download the index in zipped format but for how to unzip and look at the index you'll have to use the tools you'd normally use for these purposes.

Download zipped data file only

Download The data has been compressed and bundled with a sort program. This is only suitable for Window/DOS users. The compressed file is about 400 Kbytes but you'll need about 3 Mbytes on your disc to expand and manipulate the index. You might want to create a directory before downloading then work in that directory
(If your browser asks if you want to run or save the file say "Save"). Download now

Decompress

Either from the DOS prompt (in the directory where you saved the download) type sekwills then enter. This will expand four files.
or double click on the file "Sekwills" in Explorer.

File name Description

wills.txt Index of wills

aliases.txt Aliases

rpsort.com A truly excellent sort program by Bob Pirko. (This program is light-years better than DOS's sort)

about.txt Reference information

If you are wondering how to look at such a large text file just use your browser! Drag Wills.txt from explorer onto your browser is one way to do this.

Finding entries in bulk The simplest way to find all the entries matching some criterion is to work from the DOS prompt with the FIND and RPSORT tools. Here are some examples:
find " Seal" wills.txt >result.txt
"Find any line in wills.txt that includes the word Seal (preceeded by a space) and write the results to a file called result.txt"
rpsort wills.txt bydate.txt /+91
"Sort the wills.txt file using what starts at column 91 (ie the date) as the sort key and put the results into a file called bydate.txt"
find " Seal" wills.txt | rpsort /+91 >sealsrt.txt
Combine the techniques used in the preceeding examples. The '|' indicates take the result of what's on my left and feed it to the command on my right."