Julia (and others), Regarding the gap between liber 2 and liber 27...even the chief clerk could not answer that one. Remember...that happened more than a century before her time. My guess is that 1 to 26 were skipped because A to Z takes 26 libers, but if so...why did they create 1 and 2 which overlap two earlier ones? I have no idea why they did that, nor do I know which wills were duplicated (if any). I just know the first and last years of libers 1 and 2.. When I am asked to copy wills, I copy everything available for that individual, since the supplementary records may contain additional names of family members. For instance, my great great grandfather died when his wife was 3 months pregnant, so there was no possible way for him to name the last child in a will. Re: "Early Orange County Wills (1731 - 1830)" - it was created by humans, and I found one will that was missed by this book. OCGS has another book covering probate records of the same era, if you'd care to stop by and take a look at it. In general, though, if no will for an individual was listed in that book, the odds are very high that it doesn't exist. As for Julia's other questions, all I can add is that every case is individual, and my experience has been that even wealthy people died intestate. Some wealthy people did not have any probate records at all. Why not??? Perhaps others would care to share their experiences with probate records. Marty Irons Goshen NY k2mi@frontiernet.net