Getting Familiar with Ancestry's new Wills and Probate Release

This search did not yield any of my Kansas Slaters (George W Slater (1832-1899) and his son Lewis Logan Slater (1855-1905)).

When Ancestry first released their massive Wills and Probates collection, I raced up and down my tree looking for wills and probates of my direct ancestors--using the index form.  But for every exciting find, I was a bit disappointed that certain others had no trace.

I forgot to toy around with the individual state and county search forms.  How could I forget the browse option?  I should have learned from my experience with FamilySearch. Some of their most amazing records are not yet indexed.

NOTE: I have noticed that not all counties have results (yet?), but fortunately Greenwood County, Kansas, does:

I chose Greenwood, which had quite a few different types of will/probate-related record sets.  I chose the General Index to start:

Yay, browsing yielded some relevant Slaters!

George Slater was declared insane??  This is news to me. Helen "Slates" was actually George's granddaughter, Helen Slater.

I have not yet been able to determine what the number 961 refers to; I tried the probate cases and while they had probate cases 961 and 961a, neither were about George Slater.  Since the index was vague about where Slater's record 961 was, it looks like I will have to look at the all the other record sets in Greenwood, as well as the will and probate records in neighboring Elk County (which is also browseable).

It really pays to thoroughly examine record collections, not just rely on indexes.





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