Probate

Probate Records in Your Research

Over time the term probate has come to mean any kind of record relating to the estate of a person who died.

Whether or not your family member died testate (leaving a will)

or intestate (not leaving a will)

the chances are good that some form of probate record was generated.

American probate law has its roots in British common law but it was never uniform from state to state and in some places adopted practices from other places making records and customs more unique to that area. An example of this is Washington State’s early adoption of community property which had roots in Spanish civil law.

Probate Research takes practice and patience even in this age where many of the records are available in digital form but the records are valuable because they name relationships, children, relatives. They show emotional bonds and hint at how well the family was doing and what was important to them. They are personal documents and in places where no vital records were kept they may be the one document that ties a man to his children.

Here are the problems you can expect to encounter when using these records:

Indexing is a problem. Ancestry is in the process of indexing by testator/or person who died, but neither Ancestry or FamilySearch are close to doing everyname indexes. Thousands of names appear in probate records besides the name of the testator.

The digital images often have compiled indexes within or are indexed in the first pages or last pages of a volume but nothing is uniform.

Indexes were done in a variety of ways and methods.

Some probate packets that have been digitized have no index at all and are very difficult to access,

Customs varied from state to state; things are called by different names in New York than in Kentucky

Not everyone left a probate record. If they were quite poor and owned little property they may have given everything away to family before they died and no inventory etc. was needed.

Rural and small town people most often left some sort of record because they had farms. City people often lived in rentals and had no property to speak of so when they died there is no record of this kind.

Some probate records are really informative. Others are disappointing. Wills usually name the children and the wife; sometimes they just call her "my wife" and "my children" or only name the children who had not gotten their portions yet.

Young men did not usually think much about making a will unless they had a long-term illness. This means when the grandpa who is 30 dies of typhoid fever he probably did not make a will and may not have yet aquired enough material posessions to generate probate documents.

Sometimes probate is left in places you would not expect. Remember that aged parents frequently went to live with a child in their final years. This means the papers you think should be filed in Bardstown are not there but instead were filed two counties away where his daughter Julia lived.