Ohio Probate Records on Family Search - Tuesday's Tip

If you have Ohio ancestors, be sure and check out the Ohio probate records available on the FamilySearch site. The information is arranged by county and is in the form of images of the actual probate book pages. There are wills, estate settlements, guardian's bonds, naturalization records and other types of court records. The images are not searchable, so here are a few tips for browsing them.

• Many of the volumes have a separate index book that lists names alphabetically. If you find an ancestor in the index, the entry will point you to the volume and page number for the actual record. 
• If there is no index volume, each book usually has its own alphabetical index in the front.
• Some of the collections have multiple volumes in one set of images. If this is the case, the page numbers start over for each volume and there is a separate index in the front of each volume.
• If you are certain of a date and don't find an entry in the index, try browsing the volume for that date anyway. I found one estate settlement that did not have an index entry.
• Each image is usually a photo of two pages in the ledger, so be sure and pan around to see everything.
• The image numbers do not match the page numbers, so it takes some trial and error to find a specific page.
• The pages on the website listing the volumes for a county have a scroll bar on the right-hand side. I missed this the first time I was looking and didn't realize there were quite a few more books available.
• For estate settlements, there may be entries in different years for partial and final settlements.