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Probate Records and Wills

See also: Court Records

Probate is the legal process by which a person's property is distributed after their death. Probate records can help to identify the deceased's living children, and other descendants. Probate (or surrogate) records can provide detailed information about wills, guardianships, adoptions and changes of name. Probate records are found at the county or probate district courthouse. Probate records have been kept by most jurisdictions since they were founded. Some of the earlier records may have been microfilmed or moved to a state archive. The two main probate record types are wills and probate files.

A will is a legal document directing how a person desires their property to be disposed of after their death. It is signed by the person and witnesses, and then filed at the courthouse. The probate file contains all of the records that were created during the probate process. It can include an inventory of the estate, notices about the hearing, testimony and affidavits of claimants stating their relationship to the deceased, invoices for cemetery plots and tombstones, and the final distribution of the estate. If the deceased owned property in more that one county or probate district, there can be records in each of the jurisdictions.

  • Atkinson, Thomas E. Handbook of the Law of Wills and Other Principles of Succession Including Intestacy and Administration of Decedents' Estates. 2nd edition. Hornbook Series, 1937, Reprint, St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Co., 1953.
     
  • Anderson's 1893 Dictionary of Law.
     
  • Bartley, Scott Andrew. Researching American wills and Administration Records. Toronto: Heritage Productions, 2004.
     
  • Greenwood, Val. The Researchers Guide to American Genealogy. 3rd edition. Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2000. Has nearly seven pages dealing with probate records, legal terminology, probate process, kinds of wills, contested wills, how-to-find wills, intestate, and guardianships. a later section deals with abstracting wills and deeds.
     
  • Leary, Helen. North Carolina Research: Genealogy and Local History. 2nd edition. North Carolina Genealogical Society, 1996.  The chapter on wills is practical and very clear, especially on the typical structure of wills.
     
  • Married Women's Property Rights Bibliography.
     
  • Online Searchable Death Indexes for the USA.  Includes Obituaries, Cemeteries & the Social Security Death Index .
     
  • Public Records Finder. Source for free public records..
     
  • The Public Records Online Directory is a Portal to official state web sites, and those Tax Assessors' and Recorders' offices that have developed web sites for the retrieval of available public records over the internet. For example, some Recorders' offices have marriage and birth records available online. Although not every county and parish has data online, many have home pages, and where neither is available a phone number has been provided.
     
  • Rose, Christine. Courthouse Research for Family Historians. San Jose, California: CR Publications, 2004.
     
  • Salmon, Marylynn.  Women and the Law of  Property in Early America. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1986.
     
  • Sampubco. Databases include indexes to 300,000 wills in 17 states: Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. You can request copies of most wills for a fee.
     
  • Sampubco. Indexes to Guardianship records.
     
  • Shammas, Carole, Marylynn Salmon and Michael Dahlin. Inheritance in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Frontier Press, 1997.  Excellent look at the distribution of wealth from the 1700s to 1980, focusing on the relationship between the inheritance process and changes in capitalism and the structure of the family.
     
  • Texas Probate Records Index. A W.P.A. project of the 1940's generated indexes for probate records housed in at least 30 Texas counties.  This project brings 11 of those counties together into a single alphabetical listing.  Over 26,000 probate cases are represented in this data.