A Short Note on Probate Records
Probate records contain a variety of information such as names of heirs, friends, and associates; guardianships; property inventories; records of the estate auction; mention of real estate owned; and court orders. Probate records may pre-date vital records kept by county courthouses and in that regard may be the best piece of evidence to show family connections. When searching for probate records, take into account that the records may have been created at various times, sometimes years apart, and may be stored in different court offices. Older probate records may be deposited at the state archives. The courthouse clerk will know where the records are stored, so contact the clerk before you make a trip to the courthouse or archives.
I discovered probate records which not only verified some information I already had, but delivered new vital dates and revealed that an ancestor who was a Civil War veteran was presented a tombstone where the death date on the stone post-dated the veteran’s actual year of death by 15 years. We cannot be too hard on those researchers who came before and did not have the luxury of Ancestry.com and the myriad of other online programs, free and subscription based, which put many of our ancestors’ records at our fingertips. If probate records are overlooked, as they apparently were in this case, the researcher not only misses out on a significant amount of information, but potentially makes mistakes in research (which can be copied and spread like the worst contagious disease) which could easily have been avoided.
Until Next Time,
Randal
