First of all let me say, the surnames I was dealing with while doing the following were not ones from this list. I'm just passing on a valuable inexpensive place to possibly find death certificates and wills. There are people who go into genealogy looking for money, that would be my friend D. There are people who do it looking for the pieces of their family quilt and the stories of the lives that wove together to make us. That would be me. Sometimes the two work hand in hand. No, I didn't find great wealth, I just found where my grandmother wasn't getting all her mineral right pay outs like she should and because I knew how to document genealogy I was able to help her get the back money owed her a few years ago. Just prior to her death she spoke of some other rights, from another family member that she might should have inherited. She made my db and I promise to check on it before she died. We did. By checking missingmoney.com and foundmoney.com we discovered there was definitely some on hold, but whether or not it was hers we weren't sure. One of the big sticking points was the ancestor's will. It would tell exactly who was suppose to get what percentage of those mineral rights. Unfortunately they died in another state, and despite all of our requests for look-ups no one had to date volunteered to check for us, even for a reasonable fee. So yesterday my db and I went back to the county courthouse where the mineral right and property records were kept and started digging through the books trying to figure out if maybe those rights had in fact left our branch of the family years ago. This was our fourth trip to do this and we'd searched every record, so we thought, each time. We had even checked in the will and probate department to see if a copy of the out of state will had been filed there because of property owned in this state. We had been told no. As in all government offices the right hand apparently does not tell the left hand what they are doing. Yesterday, quite by accident my db turned to the next page following an oil lease and there a page away was the will we had been hunting for for two years. Not in the will and probate area, but in LAND records. Further searching turned up FIVE death certificates for various family members that I would have normally had to pay $5 to $15 a piece for through the health department of the various states they came from (TX, OK, AR, CA and CO) I paid $1 each for xeroxes, which is all I really need for my documentation, and $1 a p age for the will that proved that the mineral rights did NOT go to my grandmother. So if you are at a dead end on finding a will or death record, check land and mineral right records. You just might find what you are looking for. So, even though that 1/8th of the mineral right doesn't go to us as her heirs, I found some valuable genealogy info that solved a mystery for me, and got it far cheaper than if I'd gone through normal channels. Oh yeah, while on missingmoney.com, we found where my brother had some utility deposits from several years ago coming back to him. It wasn't a lot, but it will cover the $20 we spent on copies! Jan who thought this important enough to share in OK