Wills and Probate: Proving Who Belonged to Whom

Probate files name heirs, wives and children, sometimes in a single page. Learn how probate worked, what's in the file, and how to find it at the courthouse.

2 min read

Before birth certificates named parents, the best proof of a parent-child relationship was often a probate record. When someone died owning property, the court had to decide who inherited it, and that meant writing down the family. Probate files can name a widow, every living child, married daughters with their husbands, and grandchildren whose parent had died.

Testate vs. intestate

• Testate: the person left a will. The court "proved" the will and appointed the executor it named to carry it out.
• Intestate: no will. The court appointed an administrator and divided the property among the legal heirs according to state law.

Don't skip a person because they didn't leave a will. Intestate estates are often more useful, because the court had to identify every heir by law, while a will might leave out a child who had already received land.

What's in a probate file

A full estate file, sometimes called a probate packet or loose papers, can contain:

• The will, with the date it was written and the date it was proved (the person died between those two dates)
• Bonds posted by the executor or administrator, often signed by relatives
• An inventory listing everything the person owned, down to the beds and the spinning wheel
• Records of the estate sale, showing who bought what. Family members often bought keepsakes.
• Accounts of debts paid, and the final distribution to heirs
• Guardianships for minor children, who couldn't legally manage property

How to find probate records

1. Identify the county where the person lived when they died, and check whether its boundaries changed.
2. Find the probate court. Its name varies by state: probate court, orphans' court, surrogate's court, county court or chancery court. The FamilySearch Wiki page for each county explains which court handled estates.
3. Search the indexes for the deceased's name, then look in will books, administration books and court minutes.
4. Ask for the loose papers. Will books often contain only copies. The original packet may hold much more.

Many probate records are digitized on FamilySearch; some can be searched by name, and others must be browsed by county and book. Ancestry also has a large U.S. wills and probate collection.

Reading wills carefully

• Order matters, but not always. Children are often, not always, listed by age.
• "Son-in-law" could mean a stepson, and "cousin" could mean a niece or nephew. Old relationship terms were looser.
• A nominal bequest, such as "one shilling to my son James," usually means the child had already received his share, not that he was disinherited.
• "My now wife" may hint at an earlier marriage, and children from a first wife.