New Victorian Probate and Shipping indexes

PROV's volunteers have been busy again this year preparing the next instalment of the outwards immigration index 1887-1896 adding another 290,348 names to the index (total range now 1852 to 1896 with 797,460 outward passengers named). The volunteers are continuing to index the series which ends in 1923.
Volunteers from the Victorian Association of Family History Organisations (VAFHO) and FamilySearch have completed the first stage of a collaborative project with PROV to index probates in Victoria. The first stage 1841-1925 is now online and allows researchers to search for wills and probates by family name, place, occupation and date and then to link to the digitised
image of the will and/or probate file. There are 214,545 names in the index and in 2008 the FamilySearch volunteers digitised 4,724,965 pages of will and probate files which are progressively being made available to the website free of charge.
Both the shipping and probate indexes are available online (see links under New Features) and also via the How Do I? section on the home page.
Source: News from Public Records Office Victoria (eNewsletter)