Taking Care of Their Own

Settling estates perhaps has never been an easy task.  Probate records can paint a picture what may have been going on in a family, even 180 years ago.

The estate of my fourth great-grandfather William Padfield shows what a family may have to do to force a settlement that is for the good of all. William was a wealthy man in St. Clair County, Illinois, owning hundreds of acres of land. One of the earliest settlers in the area, he brought his family across the Ohio River from Kentucky in 1815, presumably because the land offices had recently opened, and his sons were coming of age to need land of their own.

Seventy-five years old, William wrote a will in 1840 and died shortly after. Eight years later, the case was still being settled. His surviving children and spouses eventually went to court to force a sale and partition of his land. Why? One of their sisters had died after her father, leaving minor children. These adult brothers and sisters were forcing an equitable division of land to benefit their sister’s sons.

The handwritten 1848 court case is on yellowed paper in a regional depository of the Illinois State Archives. Slowly unfolding both the document and the story, I realized this group of siblings did what they felt was necessary to benefit their nephews, and all of them showed up to do so. I was touching the same document that they signed…the signatures were original. Joseph Padfield, the oldest, signed first. He is my third great-grandfather. Moments of tangible connection to the past mean a lot.

Although I’ll never know the entire situation or their motives, at that moment, they became more than names I’d researched in Ancestry.com—it was a family that seemed to be taking care of their own.  

What would you like to know about your long-ago family?