We used to have a system that was county-wide, that is you could only get information on probates for towns in your particular county.   The old computer system wasn't spectacular, but it was reasonably fast & accurate &  certainly easy to use.  The probate court of Essex County stopped printing bound volumes around 1988.  Then they organized a card file index system, which I want to tell you was very scary to use.  How many times did I see someone pull the card out of the drawer, & walk up to the counter with it to fill out a ticket to get the file.  Who knows if the card was ever put back.  Right around 2000 or so the Probate Court rearranged the file card index, & printed the information into books, but after that everything stopped.  We have computer records only from 2001 in Essex County.  Now if you go to Suffok County in Boston their probate records appear to go back to the 70's-80's on the computer so it's kind of really all about what the Probate Court clerks feel like doing in terms of entry.  The new system, however, covers the entire state of Massachusetts so you can check to see if anything has been filed in any Probate Court district in Mass.  Unfortunately the system is balky, extremely slow & is very very persnickity as to what you have to do to get it to spit information out.  All in all, everyone hates it including the clerks at Probate Court who don't have an easier time with it than we do.  One more example - take the name O'Brien - in a normal world (such as the Essex South ROD) the name does not have any punctuation & is not case sensitive.  In the unhappy world of Probate Court the name is both case sensitive (you have to capitalize both the "O" and the "B") & requires correct punctuation as well.  Again all I can say is argh