Wills, if you can find them, are amazing documents. Not only do they have information about relatives of the deceased, they also can contain information about what was owned, who the property was going to be left to, etc. For years I tried to find the location of the death of and the records that would go with it for my 4th great grandfather, James Hannah. James died in 1828. I have a copy of a letter describing how the writer and his father went to get James Hannah’s wife, Nancy McKee Hannah, in Cincinnati after he died there. They brought her back to Brown County, Ohio and there she lived until she moved to Edgar County, Illinois along with the rest of the family.
So given that information, I did what seemed sensible—I looked in Hamilton County, Ohio, the location of Cincinnati. I looked at death records, church records, cemetery records, etc. I had no success. Then as luck would have it, I happened to be looking at a book, entitled Brown County Court Records, 1818-1850 by Patricia Donaldson. I checked to see what records they might have on my Hannahs and to my surprise there was James Hannah and information about his will. The date of his death fit and the administrator, Joseph Mckee, made sense as Joseph was his son-in-law. I was delighted and even more delighted when I was able to order his probate records from the Court in Brown County. From reading them, I knew that I had finally found James Hannah probate information.
I learned a couple of lessons from this. One is that no matter how convincing a memory of event is, the event may not be true. In this case, I suspect the writer was thinking of another grandparent. Second, when you cannot find a record, look in nearby counties. Had I done that, I would have found those estate documents much sooner.
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