Kinship Research for an Intestate Estate

Every state has its own intestacy statute, and community-property states such as California, Texas, and Washington treat a surviving spouse’s share differently than common-law states do. But the general shape of the succession waterfall is consistent, and kinship research is built to follow it tier by tier until it finds the closest surviving class. The federal government’s guide to settling an estate and locating unclaimed property is a useful starting orientation, though the binding rules always live in state law and the local probate court.

First tier, the spouse and descendants. A surviving spouse usually inherits everything or a large statutory share; children and their descendants take the rest, typically per stirpes, meaning a deceased child’s share drops down to that child’s own children by representation. Adopted children inherit as biological children do; stepchildren generally do not inherit under intestacy unless legally adopted. This tier is where “who counts as a descendant” gets complicated fast: a child from an earlier marriage, a child placed for adoption, or a nonmarital child with an establishable parentage link can all be heirs the immediate family never mentions.

Second tier, parents. If no spouse or descendant survives, the decedent’s parents inherit, jointly if both are living, otherwise the survivor takes the whole share.

Third tier, siblings and their descendants. With no spouse, descendant, or parent surviving, the estate passes to the decedent’s siblings, and a deceased sibling’s share drops to that sibling’s children, the decedent’s nieces and nephews, again by representation. Half-siblings are frequently included, and half-blood relationships are one of the most common places a tree quietly forks.

Fourth tier and beyond, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When death has thinned the closer generations, the search climbs to grandparents and then descends their lines to aunts, uncles, and first cousins, and sometimes cousins once removed. These distant intestate estates are where kinship research earns its keep, because the heirs are often scattered across states or countries, carry different surnames, and have no idea the decedent existed. If no living relative can be established at any recognized tier, the estate escheats to the state, so a diligent, well-documented search also protects the true heirs from losing an inheritance by default.

Kinship research does not run on ancestry hobby sites and hunches. It runs on primary records, and the backbone is vital records: birth certificates that tie a child to a parent, marriage certificates that establish spouses and name changes, divorce records that close a marriage, and death certificates that confirm who predeceased the decedent and often name that person’s own parents and children. The federal Where to Write for Vital Records directory from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics maps out how each state’s vital-records office is reached, and that state-by-state spine is where a defensible tree is sourced.

Around that spine, the research layers in the records that fill gaps and confirm relationships: obituaries that list survivors by name, cemetery and funeral-home records, census and immigration records for older generations, probate files from earlier deaths in the family, real-property deeds, and Social Security and death-index data that flag whether a person is living. When our investigators build a tree, each relationship, each “this person is the daughter of that person,” carries a source behind it, because a probate court and any guardian ad litem appointed to protect unknown heirs will test the weakest link, not the strongest one. The goal is a tree where every branch can be defended by a document, not merely asserted.

Genealogy firms are excellent at trees but hand you names, not people you can actually reach; pure skip tracers are fast at locates but cannot tell you who belongs on the list in the first place. An intestate estate needs both halves stitched together, which is why our investigators run the reconstruction and the locate as one workflow. Where a case turns on identifying who inherited a specific property, the same tree that establishes the heirs also explains the chain of title.

Kinship research is lawful public-records and genealogical research conducted for a permissible purpose, the administration of an estate. It is not legal, financial, or tax advice, and it does not replace the probate attorney who files the petition, argues the heirship, and advises on the statute. We report what the records show and document how we found it; we do not opine on how the court should rule. Where the records are incomplete, we say so plainly rather than paper over a gap, because an overstated tree helps no one and a guardian ad litem will find the seam.

We also keep the work inside its lane. This is estate-administration research, not a consumer report, and it is not used for FCRA-covered decisions such as employment, tenant, or credit screening; we are not a consumer reporting agency. When a located heir needs to be reached, we hand the administrator or attorney a current, serviceable contact path so the estate can make lawful contact, and we approach living relatives with the respect a sensitive family matter deserves. For an estate that also needs to trace what the decedent owned, our team can extend the same documented approach into an estate asset search so nothing that belongs to the heirs is left unclaimed.