Genealogy Wills, Probate & Land Records

Wills and probate name relatives directly. Land deeds prove residence and inter-generational transfers. These records are often the only reliable source for women, the enslaved, and pre-1850 US ancestors that censuses recorded only by tick-mark. For background see Genealogy Online Services; for finding the relevant locality see Genealogy Maps & Migration; for OCR of handwritten deeds see Genealogy Document Scanning & HTR.

US wills & probate

• ★ ★ FamilySearch Wills & Probate Records — free; large image collections from county courthouses across most US states. Indexes vary by state. The free starting point.
• ★ Ancestry US Wills & Probate Index, 1640s-1990s — paid; ~170M+ records. The most complete index nationwide. Covers most state surrogate / probate court collections.
• NARA (Federal probate) — free; federal court probates, freedmen's bureau, and territorial courts.
• State Archives — every US state archive has at least some online probate. Coverage varies wildly.
• County clerk websites — many counties have free index/image lookup. Quality variable.
• Ancestry Wills & Probates by state — paid; Ohio, Pennsylvania, NY, MA, VA collections especially deep.

US land records

• ★ ★ BLM GLO Records — free; Bureau of Land Management General Land Office. Federal land patents (first transfer from US government to a settler) for public-land states. Searchable by name, county, date, legal description.
  • https://glorecords.blm.gov/
• ★ FamilySearch Land Records — free; deeds, mortgages, land grants — county-by-county collections.
• Ancestry US Land Records — paid; supplements FamilySearch with extra states and indexes.
• State land records — for state-land states (the original 13 + a few others), look at state archive land grants — Virginia Land Office Patents, Pennsylvania Land Records, etc.
• Tax lists & assessment rolls — substitute for census in pre-1790 era; FamilySearch and Ancestry both carry collections.
• Atlas of Historical County Boundaries — free; the reference for "what county was this town in in 1840" — county lines moved constantly. See Genealogy Maps & Migration.

UK & Ireland

• ★ GOV.UK Probate Search — free index 1858–present; pay-per-PDF (~£1.50). The official England & Wales probate calendar.
• National Records of Scotland (NRS) Wills & Testaments — free index, paid images at ScotlandsPeople.
• PRONI (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland) — free; will calendars 1858 onward.
• Findmypast Wills & Probate — paid; UK indexes and some image sets.
• Ancestry UK Wills — paid; complementary.
• Manorial Documents Register (TNA) — free index of UK manorial records.
• Ireland Will Calendars — partly free at NAI/PRONI; pre-1858 mostly destroyed in the 1922 fire.

Continental Europe

• Geneanet — paid + free; French notarial archives (notaires) — equivalent of probate.
• Antenati — free; Italian state archive includes some notarial collections.
• Archives départementales (France) — free; departmental archives publish notarial records online increasingly.
• Polona / AGAD (Poland) — free.
• Deutsches Erbschaftsverzeichnis — German probate equivalents are scattered across regional archives.

Probate / estate-inventory specialty

• Probate Inventories Database — free academic resources for early modern Europe (UK / NL / DE).
• U.S. Civil War Widows' Pension Files (NARA) — free index, paid copies; treasure trove of biographical detail (parents, marriage proof, child birthdates).
• Freedmen's Bureau Records — free at FamilySearch; African-American ancestors' first federal records post-emancipation.

Workflow / methodology

• Identify the right court — probate courts are usually county-level (US) or surrogate / orphan's court. Land deeds are county recorder / register of deeds.
• Use the will index, then pull the file — wills appear in indexes; the actual probate packet (inventory, accounts, distribution, depositions) is often unindexed but holds the gold (lists of children, debts, estate sales).
• Land-record cluster genealogy — buy/sell patterns reveal extended families: brothers buying adjacent lots, deeds from "father to son" naming both, dower releases naming wives.
• Dower release — a wife's signature on a sale releases her future widow's share; one of the few records where an early-1800s woman's name appears.
• County boundary changes — a deed in 1845 Smith County may be filed in 1830 Brown County records (before the split). Cross-check with the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
• Pull from courthouse archives — many county records aren't online. A trip + Microsoft Lens + Paperless-ngx workflow yields hundreds of records per day.

What's changing in 2024–2026

• ★ ★ FamilySearch Full-Text Search — game-changing for this category. HTR-based search across ~600M handwritten US records (deeds, probates) means you can find a name in any deed book without an index. The single biggest 2024–2026 advance for US research.
• State archive digitization continues; many county-level deed books now online for free.
• AI extraction of wills — Claude / GPT-4o extracting structured data (heirs, executor, witnesses) from will text; community workflows emerging.
• Antenati notarial archives expansion for Italian estate research.

Pick this if…

• Default starting point, US: FamilySearch Wills & Probate, then BLM GLO for land patents.
• Best probate index, US: Ancestry US Wills & Probate.
• England & Wales probate post-1858: GOV.UK Probate Search.
• Scotland: ScotlandsPeople testaments.
• France: Geneanet + departmental archives.
• Pre-1850 US ancestor research: wills + tax + land deeds (the only sources that name them).
• Search handwritten deeds for a specific name: FamilySearch Full-Text Search — the killer 2024–2026 feature.