Glimpsing the Ancestral Home or Farm
Only a small percentage of our ancestors left wills. You are much more likely to find such items as letters of administration, guardianships and inventories of estates in probate records. The least utilized document is the estate inventory, perhaps because while it is nice to know how many hogs or chickens great-grandpa owned, it seldom spells out family relationships.
However, you are overlooking an important part of your family history if you do not take the time to study estate inventories. These documents often contain hidden genealogical information, provide a detailed look into an ancestor’s standard of living and allow you to take a tour through the property.
All estate inventories will give the name of the deceased and usually the location and date, and who appraised it. Since family members and neighbors usually took the inventories, their names should be noted. This record will give you an approximate death date of your ancestor and often the name of the township in which he resided.
Estate inventories are a detailed list of the deceased’s real and personal property and were made by going through a house room by room listing items. If your ancestor was a merchant or craftsman, the contents of his store or shop will be mentioned; if he was a farmer, there will be a count of cattle, hogs, sheep and bushels of grain. Books were highly valued before the mid-19th Century and they often are noted.
You may discover clues to family relationships in the names of persons who owed the deceased money. Money-lending within families was common prior to 1900, and loans still outstanding at death are often recorded by name and amount in estate inventories. Money given to children often was not a debt in the sense that it was to be repaid, but rather was considered a portion of his or her inheritance, given when children were establishing their own homes and had need of financial assistance. Such accounts were usually listed and then deducted from those children’s shares of the final estate.
Early inventories give the value of items in unfamiliar currencies and sometimes in the terms of commodities, such as tobacco. Later ones, while stating an amount in dollars and cents, are not easily understood because we do not know how much the value was in today’s money. It is necessary to be able to convert these figures to get an idea of what the estate was worth. Kenneth L. Smith has written an excellent guide to understanding what something was worth in his small book, “Estate Inventories: How to Use Them” (available from the author, 523 S. Weyant Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43213 for $11.50 postpaid).
Smith says that for inventories made after 1800 it is possible to convert the amounts given into current dollars by using consumer price indexes, and he includes a table that allows you to convert a dollar amount for any year between 1800 and 1900 into the equivalent amount of 1982 dollars--a handy vehicle to make sense out of old estates’ worth. For example if your ancestor left an estate of $300 in 1832--using the table to factor in the rate of 9.57 reveals that it was worth about $2,871 in 1982 money.
Another valuable section in Smith’s book is a compiled list of words (with meanings) you may find in your ancestors’ estate inventories, plus many obscure ones, such as a double johannes (a Portuguese gold coin) and a fulham jug (a drinking vessel of heavy ceramic material).
