When I had an Ancestry account, I used wills quite a bit to document family relations. Both North and South Carolina have excellent sources to original will documents and transcribed will documents. I am curious if anyone has found a way outside of a pay service to access these documents.
It is also interesting to point out that the date of the will and the date of the probate are different than the date of death. Often wills we’re done on a death bed but in many cases wills were done years before death which led to some interesting data when the executor died before probate started. You have to open the document and look at it because the titles are often the same for the will and the probate. If you see an index, note the page and scroll to that page for the document. Sometimes it’s not there but often it is buried deep in the document.
