I am seeking records on a Margaret Wylkes (d. 1639) who married Thomas Gybbes (d. 1631) and they lived in Watergall (Hodnell) on her inherited portion of her father's estate. Margaret and her two sisters were heirs of their father (their brother having died young) and I found her husband's (Thomas Gybbes) will and can't find one for her. Surely she had to leave one as she held title to extensive land. There is no listing in the A2A Wills for her; does anyone have a suggestion on where I might find a will on her? I tried all the variant spellings for her maiden name and her married name with no results. Not everyone left wills - some died before they could make them (at this time most people left making a will until the last posible moment, and some left it too long), others just didn't feel the need (for many and varied reasons: often the inheritance of their landed property was pre-determined by existing settlements, entails, jointures etc, and they had no power to leave it by will - sometimes they were happy for their property to be divided according to the rules of the general law of intestate inheritance, sometimes they had already distributed most of their assets before their death). Among women will-making was anyway much less common than among men. For a start a married woman could not make a will, but even maids and widows made wills far less frequently than men. The reason was that they generally had fewer assets, especially landed property, and even when they did own land it was often just a life-interest which ceased to exist on their death, the land going to someone else acording to pre-determined arrangements which they could not alter in a will. There is a very good book describing women's property rights and testamentary habits written by Amy Louise Erickson called 'Women and Property in Early Modern England' (Routledge, 1993). It can be found on-line in Google Books. <<Her husband does not address any grandchildren in his will, even though he had six by a deceased daughter and probably more from the other two married daughters. He only mentions his living children (3). Any ideas on why he would not mention his grandchildren (none of them)? He left large settlements on his three children amounting to thousands of pounds.>> Not all testators tried to mention every relation they had in their will, with a little nominal bequest to each one. Plenty of wills were short functional documents which just said what was necessary to divide the testator's assets among the principal heirs. The grandchildren would have benefitted from the shares directed to their parents. Matt Tompkins