Source:Massachusetts, United States. Massachusetts, Wills and Probate Records

Source Information (last updated 1 Dec 2016)

Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, Wills and Probate Records, 1635-1991 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

Original data

Massachusetts County, District and Probate Courts.

About Massachusetts, Wills and Probate Records

This collection includes images of probate records for all counties in the state of Massachusetts. Probate records are among the most valuable records available for American genealogy but can be challenging to access because originals are kept in courthouses across the country. These records come from a collection of microfilm that took years to compile. They have been brought together from multiple courthouses over time to give you a single source to search. Some localities and time periods may not be included because they were not available to be acquired as part of this collection, or the records may have been lost or destroyed before the effort to collect them all began. If you are looking for a probate record and believe it to be from a county or year range that is not included in this collection, you can try contacting the appropriate county courthouse to see if the records are available. For details on which counties and records are included in this collection, please explore the browse menu at Ancestry.com.

Types of Probate Records

Here are some of the types of documents you may run across in this collection:

• Wills.
• Letters of Administration.
• Inventories.
• Distributions and Accounting.
• Bonds.
• Guardianships.