art 15
 
If no will can be found, you must search for other papers. Usually you will find court orders appointing an administrator or executor. If a person left a will, he often named an "executor" of the will and the court required that person to post a bond. If a person died "intestate" (without a will), then the court usually appointed an "administrator." Thus the use of executor or administrator in court records indicates whether a will was left. Most counties have indexes of executors' and administrators' bonds. If you search long enough and hard enough you can almost always find some court record of a person's
death - at least those who owned property, for there had to be some disposition of that property.
 
DEEDS
Sometimes the answer can be found in deeds, although these usually do not contain genealogical information. At a minimum, deeds help you establish where your ancestors lived and when. Occasionally you will find family references such as "the same land which I inherited from my father, Samuel, as his eldest son and heir." Also, some land records, particularly those for settlement of estates, may list heirs. If your ancestor conveyed "an undivided fifth interest" in a piece of property it would indicate that he and four other heirs, likely his siblings, may have inherited the property.
 
Deeds can also help establish whether an ancestor was married, since the sale
of land requires the wife's consent. The absence of a wife's name indicates
the seller was unmarried at the time. In one case, I was unable to find the date of death for an ancestor's wife prior to his remarriage to another woman. To complicate matters, both women had the given name Elizabeth. However, careful checking of deeds involved in his many land transactions revealed a period of about two years when he sold land without a wife signing. This information revealed the approximate dates of the first woman's death and his later remarriage.
 
While most counties have accurate indexes of deed records, usually these are a "grantor" (seller) index and a "grantee" (buyer) index. Other persons who may be mentioned in a deed are not indexed and the information you are looking for may be "lost" in one of dozens of deed books. I once solved a perplexing
genealogical problem for another person quite by accident. She wrote wanting to know if perhaps two of her ancestor's daughters had married into the Pence family since the two families were neighbors. They hadn't. But one day while checking a deed for some land my ancestor had bought, I discovered all of the
information relating to the marriages of her ancestor's children. Turned out that the land was being sold by her ancestor's heirs, one of whom was a daughter whose existence and married name were unknown. The deed was indexed under the name of the unknown daughter's husband along with "et al" - "and
others." Naturally, the persons she was looking for were among the "others."
Moral: You may have to check deeds for in-laws of your ancestors as well as those for neighbors in order to find that elusive fact.