← The Probate Archive
— Collection · 49 cases
Historical
Nine centuries of it. Church courts that judged the dead's soul, a 1540 statute that invented the freedom to leave your land to whoever you like, a Chancery suit so long Dickens built a novel on it, and the wills that founded prizes and cities.
The Mormon Will· 9-min read
Howard Hughes
One of the richest men on earth died without a will. Roughly forty of them then appeared — including a handwritten one, left on a desk at church headquarters, giving a Utah gas-station owner $156 million for a ride he said he gave a stranger in the desert.
The residuary clause that left the family forever· 8-min read
Marilyn Monroe
She left three quarters of everything to her acting coach, outright, with no one named after him. He outlived her by twenty years. When he died it passed to his third wife — a woman Monroe never met — who turned it into a fifty-million-dollar brand.
The Great Stork Derby· 8-min read
Charles Vance Millar
A Toronto lawyer with no family left his fortune to whichever woman in the city gave birth to the most children in the ten years after his death. He meant it as a joke about human greed. Then the Depression arrived and it stopped being funny.
The lawyer who never made a will· 8-min read
Abraham Lincoln
He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836 and practised for a quarter century. He drafted wills for his clients. When he was assassinated in 1865 he left none of his own, and a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court spent two and a half years sorting it out for free.
$2.8 million, and none of it hers· 8-min read
Aimee Semple McPherson
The most famous preacher in America died in 1944 with a personal estate of about $10,000. The organisation she founded was valued at $2.8 million. Her son took over the day she died — not by inheritance, but because the corporate bylaws said so.
Convicted of paperwork· 9-min readFlorida
Al Capone
The federal government never proved Al Capone did the things he is remembered for. It proved he had not paid his income tax. He died on Palm Island in Miami Beach in 1947 still owing that government money — and the house everyone calls Capone's mansion was bought in his wife's name.
The trust that ran Florida· 10-min readFlorida
Alfred I. duPont & Ed Ball
Alfred I. du Pont died outside Jacksonville in 1935 and left almost everything to a trust for crippled children. His brother-in-law ran it for the next 46 years — a bank chain, a railroad, a paper company, half the Panhandle — until Congress amended the banking laws to make him choose.
The will that created the prizes· 8-min read
Alfred Nobel
Nobel wrote his own will in four handwritten pages, left 94% of his fortune to an organisation that did not exist, and named no country as his home. It took five years, a family lawsuit, and an executor moving securities out of France to make it work.
Eighteen months, not seven years· 8-min read
Amelia Earhart
She vanished over the Pacific on July 2, 1937. The rule then said seven years of absence before a court would call someone dead. Her husband did not wait. On January 5, 1939 a Los Angeles judge declared her dead and opened an estate reported at just over $10,000 — for the most famous woman in aviation.
The name he could not leave to anyone· 8-min read
Babe Ruth
He died in 1948 having built the most valuable name in American sport. Forty-two years later his two daughters sued a publisher for using his photograph and lost outright — New York gave the dead no right of publicity at all. In 2024 one of his shirts sold for $24.12 million.
Poor little rich girl· 9-min read
Barbara Hutton
She inherited a Woolworth fortune at twelve, took control of it outright at twenty-one, and married seven times. Almost nothing about her spending was illegal or even unusual for her class. What is instructive is the structure: a trust that protected her until her twenty-first birthday and then simply stopped.
The two-hundred-year experiment· 8-min read
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin left £1,000 each to Boston and Philadelphia with instructions to lend it to young tradesmen at 5% and let it compound for two centuries. The cities did roughly that. The money came out in 1990, and Boston still had to litigate who got it.
The will she signed two years after the book· 8-min read
Bette Davis
Her daughter published a memoir in 1985. In 1987 she signed a will naming both daughters and both grandsons as intentionally omitted, and split everything between her son and her assistant. Nobody contested it. The order of those events is the whole legal story.
The novelist who wrote his own last chapter, and lost· 9-min read
Charles Dickens
He directed a plain funeral, no public announcement, and — emphatically — no monument of any kind. Five days after he died his friends had him buried in Westminster Abbey and the grave left open for the public. The clause that did hold was the one giving all his private papers to his sister-in-law.
Ninety-five percent to one son· 9-min read
Cornelius Vanderbilt
The Commodore died in 1877 leaving the largest fortune in America — and left roughly ninety-five percent of it to a single son. Three of his other children went to court alleging insanity, spiritualists, and undue influence, and New York read the transcript over breakfast for more than a year.
The paintings the artist gave away· 10-min read
Donor intent
Norman Rockwell gave two paintings to the museum in the town where he had lived. Forty years after his death the museum announced it would sell them to fund its own survival. His sons sued and were told they had no right to be in the room.
Fourteen years, three jurisdictions, one will nobody could find· 9-min read
Errol Flynn
He died in 1959 leaving a 1954 will, an ex-wife who said there was a 1957 one, a bank he had not paid, a tax authority that wanted its share, and real property in three countries. The estate stayed in probate for about fourteen years. One beneficiary was declared dead in 1984.
The body that was hidden for sixteen years· 9-min read
Eva Perón
She was embalmed to last centuries. Three years later a military government took the body from the building where it lay, moved it around Buenos Aires, shipped it to Italy, and buried it in Milan under another woman's name. Her widower got it back in 1971.
Everything owned, nothing held· 9-min read
Father Divine
The Peace Mission movement owned hotels in Philadelphia, farms in the Hudson Valley, and a 73-acre chateau on the Main Line. Its leader held title to almost none of it — which made his assets nearly impossible to sue and made one $4,476 judgment the most consequential case of his life.
The gift with a life estate reserved· 8-min read
Franklin D. Roosevelt
He gave his house to the United States and kept the right to live in it. He gave away his own papers and had to invent an institution to receive them. He died on April 12, 1945; seven months later his family gave up their rights early, and the government moved in.
Burn everything, unread· 10-min read
Franz Kafka's papers
Kafka left written instructions that his friend Max Brod destroy every manuscript, diary and letter without reading them. Brod published all of it. Ninety-two years later the Supreme Court of Israel decided who owned the pile — and the question underneath is one Florida answers every week.
Twenty-nine pages, no lawyer, no witnesses· 9-min read
George Washington
He wrote it himself over the summer of 1799 — twenty-nine pages in his own hand, on paper bearing his own watermark, and he said so in the document: no professional character had been consulted. It is one of the most studied wills in American history. Florida would not admit a page of it.
The law written for one marriage· 9-min readFlorida
Henry Flagler
Flagler built Standard Oil with Rockefeller, then built Florida — the railway, Palm Beach, Miami, Key West. In 1901 the Florida legislature made incurable insanity a ground for divorce. He was the only person ever divorced under it. It was repealed in 1905.
Thirty downstrokes, one in a sextillion· 9-min read
Hetty Green
Before she became the richest woman in America, Hetty Green sued her aunt's estate over a disputed page said to leave her everything. The defence hired a Harvard mathematician, who calculated the odds that the signature was genuine at roughly one in 2.666 sextillion. It is the first great use of statistics as evidence in an American courtroom.
The case that made inheritance property· 9-min read
Hodel v. Irving
Congress decided that fractional interests in Indian land worth a few dollars would simply stop passing to heirs. The Supreme Court held that taking away the right to leave something to your family is itself a taking — the first time the Court said so.
The trust that outlived everyone, and the name that kept working· 9-min read
Humphrey Bogart
He died in 1957 leaving a trust for his wife and two small children. It was still being administered when Lauren Bacall died fifty-seven years later. By then the family's real asset was not the money — it was the surname, licensed more than a hundred times and defended in federal court against a sofa.
1,103 heirs· 8-min read
Ida Wood
She spent twenty-five years in a Herald Square hotel suite with a fortune in cash, under a Southern-belle identity she had invented at nineteen. When she died in 1932, more than eleven hundred people came forward claiming to be her family. Ten of them actually were.
The house nobody could afford to keep· 8-min readFlorida
James Deering
Deering spent a reported $15 million building a Renaissance villa on Biscayne Bay, then died in 1925 with no wife and no children. His two nieces inherited 180 acres of Miami waterfront and spent twenty-seven years working out how to get rid of it.
The case that ate the estate· 8-min read
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
Dickens invented a probate suit so long that the heirs grew old inside it, and ended it in the only way it could end: the lawyers' costs consumed the entire fortune. He based it on real cases. One of them ran for sixty-two years.
The oldest instruction still being followed· 8-min read
Jeremy Bentham
His will directed that his body be dissected in front of an audience, then dressed, seated in his own chair with his own walking stick, and kept in a case. It was done in 1832. It is still being done. No court has ever been asked to enforce it.
“For reasons which are well known to them”· 8-min read
Joan Crawford
She adopted four children and left two of them nothing, in eleven words that gave no reason and started a two-year fight. The disinherited pair objected to probate on capacity and undue influence. The estate paid $55,000 to make it stop.
The estate nobody got to read· 8-min read
John F. Kennedy
The most examined presidency in American history left an estate almost nobody has seen. Kennedy used a revocable living trust with a pour-over will, so the inventory never had to be filed. The money underneath it sat in trusts his father built decades before Congress wrote a rule for them.
For as long as she does not remarry· 9-min read
John Jacob Astor IV
The richest man on the Titanic left a pregnant teenage widow the income from a five-million-dollar trust and the use of two great houses — on one condition. She remarried four years later and gave all of it up. The terms are constantly misreported, and the law behind them surprises people.
The house kept ready· 7-min read
John Porter Bowman
Bowman buried a wife and two daughters, built them a $75,000 mausoleum, then left $50,000 in trust to keep his Vermont mansion maintained exactly as he left it — in case the family came back. The money ran out in the 1950s.
The business succession that worked, and the box that did not· 9-min read
Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz
They built a studio together, divorced, and then did the one thing most co-founders never manage: one bought the other out, cleanly, at a price. By the time either of them died there was no company left to argue about. The argument that did happen was over love letters and a Rolls-Royce.
Ancestors who belong to no estate· 10-min read
NAGPRA and repatriation
Probate answers who inherits a person's property. It has never answered who is responsible for a person's remains when the death was centuries ago and the descendants are a nation rather than a family. In 1990 Congress wrote a separate statute for that, and it is still being worked through.
The will at Saint Helena· 8-min read
Napoleon Bonaparte
Dying on a rock in the South Atlantic, Napoleon wrote out a will in his own hand naming 97 legatees, added codicils for a week, and left money to a man acquitted of shooting at the Duke of Wellington. His burial wish took nineteen years to honour.
The will that made a statute· 9-min read
Peter Thellusson
Thellusson died in 1797 directing his fortune to accumulate through the lives of every son and grandson living at his death. Projections ran to £14 million. Parliament passed a law to stop anyone doing it again, and by the time the last heir was identified in 1859 the costs had eaten the growth.
Who owns what a president wrote· 10-min read
Presidential papers
For nearly two centuries a president's papers were his personal property, to keep, sell, seal, or burn. A widow with a furnace, a son with a safe, and one former president with 3,700 hours of tape changed that — and it took an Act of Congress and $18 million to finish the argument.
Separated is not divorced· 8-min read
Sylvia Plath
Plath and Ted Hughes separated in October 1962. She died the following February with no will, still legally his wife — so he inherited everything, including her copyrights and her journals. He edited the poems, published the diaries, and destroyed the last volume. Intestacy decided fifty years of literary history.
The womanless library· 7-min read
T.M. Zink
An Iowa lawyer left five dollars to his daughter and the rest of his estate to sit for 75 years, then build a library that no woman could enter and no woman's work could sit on the shelves. His daughter had the will set aside inside five months.
At least 2,500 dead, and almost no estates· 9-min readFlorida
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane
The dike failed on the night of September 16, 1928, and the south shore of Lake Okeechobee went under. It remains the deadliest disaster in Florida history. Most of the dead were buried in mass graves, most were never identified, and almost none of them ever had an estate opened.
Thirty envelopes in a safe· 9-min read
The sealed royal wills
In England a proved will is a public document anyone can buy a copy of. Except for one family. Since 1910 the wills of senior royals have been sealed by court order, and in 2021 a judge sealed Prince Philip's for ninety years after a hearing nobody was told about.
2,300 claimants· 8-min read
The Wendel sisters
The Wendels owned more than 150 Manhattan buildings and lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion with gas lamps, no telephone, and no electricity. When the last sister died in 1931 leaving roughly $100 million to charity, more than 2,300 people came forward claiming to be family.
The estate that could not pay· 9-min read
Thomas Jefferson
He died on the Fourth of July owing about $107,000. Six months later his executors sold the contents of Monticello, the farm equipment, and 130 human beings over five days in the cold. The house went in 1831 for around seven thousand dollars. The principal was not cleared until 1878.
The estate plan he had to write himself· 8-min read
Ulysses S. Grant
A partner's Ponzi scheme took everything he had in May 1884. That autumn he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He spent the last year of his life writing two volumes at the pace of a man racing a diagnosis, finished on July 18, 1885, and died five days later. His widow received about $450,000.
Seven hundred bank accounts, and other things that were not true· 9-min read
W.C. Fields
The story is that he hid a fortune in hundreds of accounts under invented names. A biographer went and looked: about two dozen accounts, all in his own name. The parts of this estate that were real — a college for orphans, and a body nobody would cremate — took sixteen years to resolve.
The ninety-two year wait· 7-min read
Wellington R. Burt
A Saginaw lumber baron died in 1919 having decided his children would get almost nothing. His will locked the fortune until twenty-one years after the death of his last grandchild alive when he died. Twelve descendants finally collected in 2011.
The second-best bed· 8-min read
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare left his wife of thirty-four years one item: the second-best bed. Four centuries of readers have taken that as a parting insult. The period law of dower, and the going price of a bed in 1616, suggest they have it backwards.
— Other collections
These are not our cases. Everything on this page is drawn from published court records and news reporting, cited below. It is general information about how probate and trust law works — not legal advice, and not a prediction about any case. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Other states' law differs from Florida's, which is usually the whole point of the story.