Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
There are times when I really wonder just how many genealogists are really involved in the construction of the website interface at Ancestry.com. This is one of those times. I was usingAncestry.com‘s “Illinois, Wills and Probate Records, 1772-1999” to look at the 1885-era Adams County, Illinois, probate file for Heinrich Mennen Aden. I was hoping to […]
Filing systems can vary slightly from one location to another. The researcher should not expect one location to use the exact same filing structure as a nearby location. A search of the Illinois, Wills and Probate Records, 1772-1999 for the last name of Sartorius in Adams County, Illinois, resulted in three entries for Herman Sartorius in the […]
Before you search the “probate database” at Ancestry.com, search the inventory to determine what they have. Their inventory is not as descriptive as it could be and some users have reported having difficulty finding it on their site. Our original post on this database included a link to the specific state databases. Choose the state of […]
Ancestry.com‘s huge “probate database” contains images of hundreds of thousands of probate materials from across the United States. This collection appears to have been taken almost completely from microfilmed materials of the Family History Library. Some of that microfilmed material has been put online, but a significant portion of it has not and Ancestry.com‘s publication of […]
[see our followup post here] Ancestry.com has added a tremendous amount of probate materials to the site for a variety of United States states to their site. A few general comments about these records: They are not every name indexed–in many cases it is the individual whose estate is being settled. The indexes are not […]
