In a message dated 04/24/2001 3:10:06 PM Mountain Daylight Time, jleehunt1@aol.com writes: > Although they did away with primogeniture, the > wills are full of examples of entailing the lands left to the sons and > daughters either forbidding them to sell the land outside of the family, or > laying out the proper descent of the testator's lands (thus you get those > marvelous wills where they say and "should Leaven die without heirs and > before coming of age then the land left to him to be the property I've got one (York Co VA 1688) where he goes through the whole list of sons, sons children, etc. and finally winds up saying if there's no one left here, it goes to the first son of his uncle's line (the uncle was an oldest son) who comes to the New World. I'm sure he thought he had locked it up tight for eternity, but the 3rd great grandson who inherited it in 1730--under the strict primogeniture of the 1688 will--sold it four years later. So much for eternity. What I need to know is what "laws" of inheritance might have been followed in 1730 Stafford Co. if a man died intestate. I think I can identify several sons, but none of the patterns of location seems to follow primogeniture. The inventory of his estate is signed by his brother and his widow--which suggests to me the sons were not of age, but how then would property have been distributed as they grew older? Why is the one who seems the eldest buying property several miles away while an apparently younger son got the "home" plantation? Who decided that? Did the mother control the land? She remarried within a couple of years--would her second husband have had some control over which son got what? I think I can identify the second son--he inherited land under his paternal uncle's will (1733), the uncle having no sons of his own. But as best I can tell, the oldest never owned anything he didn't buy, and the youngest owned land he never bought. But since there's no will... Any suggestions? Karen Dale