Probate: the will, the inventory and the final account

June 2025 · 3 min read

For a long time I thought of probate as “the will”, and if an ancestor had not left one, I moved on. That was a mistake. A will is one document in a file that can run to thirty or forty pages, and in the cases where there was no will at all, the rest of the file still exists and is often more useful, because the court had to work out who the heirs were and write it down.

A full probate packet, in the courts I have worked with, tends to contain:

A petition asking the court to open the estate, which names the person applying and their relationship to the deceased.
The will, if there was one, and the testimony of the witnesses who saw it signed.
A bond posted by the executor or administrator, with the names of the people who guaranteed it, who are very often relatives.
An inventory and appraisal of everything the person owned, down to the chairs.
A sale bill listing what was sold, to whom and for how much.
A final account and distribution showing who received what share.

The inventory is the document that brings a person closest. The one I read this spring listed a feather bed, two cows and a heifer, a loom with its gears, a spinning wheel, a set of pewter plates and eleven books, which in that household and that decade tells me more about how they lived than any other record I have. The sale bill that followed showed the loom going to a neighbor and most of the furniture to people who share the family’s surname, which is how I found two previously unknown sons-in-law.

The distribution is the gold. It names every heir who received a share, and daughters appear under their married names, often with their husbands alongside. In one file the distribution listed six children, where I had known of four. The two new names were married daughters whose weddings I had never found because they had married in a different county. The probate court did my work for me, forty years after the fact.

My method now is to read the entire packet, in order, and to look for the loose papers as well as the neatly recorded will books. The recorded copies are easier to read; the loose originals have the signatures, the crossings-out and the notes in the margin that the clerk left out. Both matter, and they do not always agree.