Michael John Neill posed this rhetorical question in a recent Genealogy Tip of the Day. Should you stop “five years after they died? Thirty years after they died? Never?”
“It can be difficult to tell. The important thing is to not stop searching after the individual’s estate has been settled. A deceased person can easily be mentioned in court records decades after their death. Recently, I discovered a court case involving a property line dispute that mentioned in 1914 an ancestor who died in 1855. Information on the heirs of the long-dead ancestor were mentioned in the 1914 court records–sixty years after he died. It is not unusual for affidavits to be filed with land records that provide information about events that took place fifty years or more before the affidavit was filed.
“Don’t just look for a relative in local court and other records until their death or until their estate was settled. They may very well have been mentioned decades after their death in those very same records.”
Reposted by Robin McCarthy with permission from Michael John Neill.
