Chasing a Probate That Never Existed: Rethinking John Webb’s Final Years

When newspapers answer the question probate records could not

Purpose Statement
This post documents my search for John Webb’s probate record and explains how newspaper and land records revealed a different ending to his story than I initially assumed.

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For a long time, I was convinced I knew how John Webb’s story ended. I had his tombstone. It gave me a name, a clear death year, and a burial place. From there, I did what genealogists are trained to do next: I went looking for a probate record. If I knew when and where he died, surely there would be an estate file waiting somewhere nearby.

That search became relentless.

I checked probate indexes repeatedly. I widened county boundaries. I searched neighboring jurisdictions. I followed courthouse reorganizations and record losses. Over and over, I came up empty. What bothered me most was that John Webb was not an obscure figure in the family story. I knew a great deal about him already, largely through the biographical sketch of his son, John P. Webb. That biography outlined John Webb’s earlier life, his migrations, and his role as a father. It gave shape to the man, even if it did not describe his death in detail.

Because of that, the missing probate felt like a loose thread I could not ignore.

What I did not know, and what I had completely missed, was that John Webb’s story did not end where I thought it did. I had no idea that he spent part of his final decade in Kansas.

That realization did not come from a probate file at all. It came from newspapers.

An obituary published in 1880 revealed that John Webb had settled in Smith County, Kansas, in the early 1870s and had taken a homestead several miles north of town. This was a major shift in my understanding. The John Webb I thought I knew, the man anchored to earlier states and earlier generations, had quietly moved west late in life. When his health failed, he left Kansas and returned to Missouri, where he died at his son’s home. That explained why the tombstone placed him there, but it also explained why my probate searches had been so unfocused. I had been looking for the end of a story without knowing its final chapter.

Even more telling was a later court notice from Kansas, published several years after his death. It referenced John Webb as deceased, named his son John P. Webb, and addressed “unknown heirs.” The case involved foreclosure on land John Webb had mortgaged shortly before his death. What stood out was not just the land, but the legal language. There was no executor. No administrator. No estate being represented. The court proceeded by publication, a clear signal that no probate had been opened to resolve the property.

Suddenly, the absence of a probate record made sense.

Part of the newspaper notice

The court notice shows that John Webb had mortgaged his Kansas land shortly before his death and that the debt remained unresolved years later. Rather than appearing in a probate file, the issue was addressed through foreclosure proceedings. In the course of researching this question, I came across explanations of nineteenth-century probate practice that I had not previously considered. Those explanations helped me understand that when land was mortgaged late in life and later resolved through foreclosure, a formal probate proceeding did not always follow.

Even more telling was a later court notice from Kansas, published several years after his death. It referenced John Webb as deceased, named his son John P. Webb, and addressed “unknown heirs.” The case involved foreclosure on land John Webb had mortgaged shortly before his death. What stood out was not just the land, but the legal language. There was no executor. No administrator. No estate being represented. The court proceeded by publication, a clear signal that no probate had been opened to resolve the property.

The mortgage itself involved what seems like a small sum. The original amount, $41.75 in 1880, with a smaller balance still unpaid years later, would be roughly equivalent to about $1,300 today when adjusted using Consumer Price Index (CPI) estimates. Rather than prompting a full estate administration, the unresolved debt appears to have been handled directly through foreclosure.

What began as a frustrating search for a missing record turned into something more valuable: an explanation for why the record does not exist.

This experience has been a reminder of how easily assumptions can shape our research paths. I assumed John Webb stayed where he had lived most of his life. I assumed probate was inevitable. I assumed the tombstone told the whole story. It did not. The newspapers did not just add color. They corrected my framework.

For now, I am setting this question down. I understand John Webb’s final years better than I did before, even without a probate file to point to. Sometimes the work is not about finding one more record, but about recognizing when the evidence already in hand has answered the question in a different way.

Sources

Modern dollar equivalent calculated using CPI-based historical inflation estimates from MeasuringWorth.com, where one U.S. dollar in 1880 is approximately equal to $30–$35 today.

Smith County Pioneer (Smith Center, Kansas):

• Obituary of John Webb, published 14 May 1880.
• Legal notice regarding foreclosure proceedings against John P. Webb and the unknown heirs of John Webb, deceased, published 13 February 1885.
• Both articles accessed via Newspapers.com.