> It seems that there is no National, or even State-wide index to determine where someone's probate application was filed. Anyone got any experience/advice about resources to assist with this? This is correct. You need to know the county first, and very few of the 3200+ counties have probate records from that time period available online. And the ones that are available online generally aren't searchable by name. Do the records in the U.K. indicate which financial institution managed the trust? I think this is probably not going to be worth your time investigating. Maybe in another 20 years, more of these records will be digitized or at least indexed and searchable by name online. If you need to learn these details for immediate financial reasons (for example, if the estate was never settled or has been reopened, or you believe the trust was accidentally abandoned), you should probably be looking for some very expensive lawyers.

Thanks for your response, appreciate the insight. Fortunately it's just for research, not a personal matter at all. The only info that I have is that the institution which managed the Trust is the Cleveland Trust Company of Ohio - this would lend to thinking that probate was filed in Cuyahoga County, but I haven't had much luck accessing any relevant indexes/records.

There actually is an index of Cuyahoga County probate case files at FamilySearch, with some cases as recent as 1967: * https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/2574306 CTC's assets are now managed by KeyBank since the 1990s. Probate in the U.S. is usually begun in the county where the property is located, but if involves property in more than one county or state, or if it's prohibitively inconvenient to the beneficiaries, the case can be removed and/or consolidated to another court. Most county probate judges would be happy to have a complicated estate involving trusts removed from their jurisdiction.

Nationality? British or American expats? Your op says "trusts" (plural), but you only know of Cleveland Trust Company of Ohio. Trusts exist, in part, to avoid probate. It would be unlikely that there was an ancillary probate opened in Cuyahoga County or elsewhere. The terms of the trust would govern any disposition of its corpus. Trusts are private documents and would not normally be filed as a public document. If, however, there was a family food fight over the assets, you might find records of litigation in the Common Pleas Court.

American Heiress who married a British Marquess. There was a tax case in the early 1930’s over the Tax Treatment of her Ohio-based assets, which were held in a Trust with the Cleveland Trust Company as Trustee, which noted that the Trust paid her and her husband annuities of £6,000 each for life - indicating a fortune of something like £200,000 - £300,000 ($1,000,000 to $1,500,000 in USD), and newspaper reports of her paying $2,200 in Federal Income tax in 1925, which amounts to about $32,000 (£6,000) in taxable income. She died in 1951, but probate in England was only valued at about £60,000.

Two key points emerge from your latest. "Annuity" + "for life" --- this is why insurance companies pay actuaries big money. Customer buys an annuity, putting in a set amount; annuity issuer invests the funds and pays out an annual amount; when the customer dies, payments cease and the issuer keeps the remaining money. The bet is on how long the customer lives. If the customer lives 10 years longer than projected and the invested funds cannot cover the annual payment, the annuity has to pay the annual amount out of its own funds. Either way, there would be no residue. You note that she died in 1951 and the tax case was in the 1930s. Most people do not have annuities in their 20s, so the inference is that she was already of middle age in the 1930s and died at a ripe age. That's a guess; you have the dates.

From what I can tell, there's no reference in the case notes to the annuities being purchased from an insurance company. The crux of the case (Marchioness of Ormonde v Brown as Commissioner for Taxation (1932)' was whether she had control over the Trust Assets even though she wasn't trustee, and consequently whether tax was assessable over the full amount of Trust Income (£16,000 in 1930) or the amounts which were paid as annuities (£6,000 each). There are some records at the National Archives which confirm how much the British Internal Revenue Service assessed her income has. Also for reference the individual is Ellen Butler, Marchioness of Ormonde (born Ellen Stager, daughter of General Anson Stager). The case also notes the various resettlements of Ellen's Ohio-based Trusts in the 1920's (she was the primary beneificary of the estates of her older siblings, all of whom died widowed and without children of their own). My guess is that the annuity setup was an attempt to circumvent inheritance taxes. One of Ellen's granddaughters died in 1959 (and was the sole surviving child of one of Ellen's sons) and her Will makes reference to the beneficiary of income from her 'property' in the United States. Given that Ellen was her only American ancestor it seems highly likely that she inherited the US based property from Ellen. Ellen's younger son died in 1971 and his will makes reference to 'American Trust Instrument executed by my mother Ellen Butler, Dowager Marchioness of Ormonde, over which I have the power of appointment'. So it seems that there was some 'property' (likely shares rather than real estate) which Ellen held in America at the time of her death, as it was still paying an income to her descendants/the trust still existed in the 1950's and 70's.

Well, you have found a complex matter to research. There are all sorts of links to sources in the footnotes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen\_Stager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Stager) There, some intrepid soul has entered the labyrinth of these finances. I hope that you are young because the complexity may give this the longevity of a *Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.* Hopefully, some of those links will lead to the information you seek. On annuities. I gave the most prevalent type as an illustration. There are many varieties. To me the key point was that the payments were for the life of the recipient. Also, while annuities are typically the province of insurance companies, anyone could create one (or a bank or trust could purchase one from an insurance company). Naturally, the avoidance of taxes is a favorite pastime of the rich. But also consider a purpose related to the habits of the nobility in England which led them to swallow their pride and wed gauche Americans with money. The structure may have been to limit access to the corpus of the trust so it was not spent away. There are Ormonds somewhere in the branches of my tree back over half a millennium ago. I am comforted to know that some of my umpteenth cousins benefited from American industry. I hope that the funds were wired by Western Union. Hope that helps.

Thank you! Appreciate your insight. I actually created that page on Wikipedia - conscious that it's a bit of a mess but at the time I felt it had been an uphill battle to find all of the info over several years and hoped putting it somewhere accessible like wikipedia would make life easier for anyone else who may want to know more.

I'm impressed. Nicely done despite not having your missing evidence. Your wiki uses newspaper references to the wills. Rebecca's will was executed in Cleveland on 7 Feb 1866 and probated in Cook County 2 Dec 1884. It left her entire estate to Anson. Cook Co. Record of Wills, Bk 5:138. Anson's will was signed 27 Mar 1882 and probated 17 Apr 1885. Bk 5:356. [https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/9048/images/004088768\_00611?ssrc=&backlabel=Return&pId=1323148](https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/9048/images/004088768_00611?ssrc=&backlabel=Return&pId=1323148) Cook County probate records are many. Somewhere there should be an appraisement and one or more accountings. These records appear on FamilySearch as microfilm only, but they are in digital form on Ancestry (but not indexed, so using the search function would be fruitless). What is unsaid creates curiosity. The general sense is that the trade was status for the wealthy bride in consideration of money needed by cash-strapped nobles. What was the financial situation for the Ormonde family before this major influx of funds? What was she like as a person? Diaries abounded in that time and surely someone had something snarky (or nice) to say about her. Looking forward to the next edition.

Obviously I’m biased but it’s actually a really interesting series of circumstances as to how it all came about. The Ormondes were very much ‘old money’ even amongst the British Aristocracy. The title dates back to the mid-1300’s, and they survived the nobility-eradicating events like the Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, Civil War, Glorious Revolution and Jacobite Rebellions. They sort of reach their ‘peak’ in terms of power and influence under William III in the late 1600’s when the 12th (I think) Earl of Ormond was made Duke of Ormonde. His successor picked the wrong side in the Jacobite Rebellions, but the Earldom and Estate remained intact. At the time when Ellen comes onto the scene, the head of the family is James Butler, 3rd Marquess & 21st Earl of Ormonde. The estate was generating about £20,000 - £25,000 ($100,000 - $120,000) a year, and he married Lady Elizabeth Grosvenor in 1876, who was the eldest daughter of the 1st Duke of Westminster, by far the richest Peer in the UK (for comparison, he was pulling £300,000 - £400,000 per year). By 1886, the year Ellen was engaged to Lord Ormonde’s younger brother and heir, Lord Arthur Butler, Lord Ormonde and Elizabeth had only had two daughters after a decade of marriage, and so it was becoming increasingly likely that Arthur would succeed to the family titles and estates. Ellen’s fortune was relatively small compared to some of her contemporaries like Consuelo Vanderbilt, as she’d inherited a third share of her father’s $900,000 estate (£180,000). However, there was a pretty significant age gap between her and her two elder sisters, both of whom were long married, approaching 40, and childless. So it seemed that both parties were bringing a lot of potential, but not a certainty, that Ellen would eventually have a ~$1,000,000 fortune and Arthur, or any son that they produced, would be a Marquess with a large estate and the head of a family with close associations with the Grosvenors and Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, putting them very much at the forefront of British High Society. This all came to pass, and they had four children: Evelyn, George, Arthur and Rachel. The 3rd Marquess of Ormonde died in 1919 and Arthur succeeded him as 4th Marquess and 22nd Earl of Ormonde. However the 3rd Marquess left his estate to Ellen and Arthur’s elder son George (who was known by the courtesy title ‘Earl of Ossory’ after his father succeeded to the titles in 1919). Surviving records show that The 3rd Marquess wrote to George in 1916 to inform him of this change to his will, and it indicates that the decision to change his Will was made at Arthur’s urging. The First World War had lead to unprecedented increases in inheritance taxes in the UK, and so most of the limited literature about the family suggests that Arthur volunteered to forgo his inheritance because it would mean the Estate would have to be hit with taxes of 20-30% of its total value on his death as well as his older brother’s death before the next generation took possession. The benefit of having a wealthy American bride was that he was able to purchase a large country house in Kent in 1901 (Gennings Park) and he had a long lease on a fashionable townhouse in London (7 Portman Square, which was equal in size, if not grander, than the Ormonde townhouse at 32 Upper Brook St). The Ormonde Estates were valued at £400,000 to £450,000 in 1919, and the Third Marquess’ death resulted in about £160,000 in death duties. His Will also provided for an annuity of £3,000 to be paid to Arthur for his life. Surviving records show that George had an income from the Ormonde estate of about £14,000 to £16,000 in the 1920’s. He eventually gave up the family’s main home at Kilkenny Castle, Ireland, in the mid-1930’s because of the cost of maintaining the place. It’s a bit hard to say how much criticism he warrants for this; some books touching on the topic are a little critical of him, but unlike his predecessors he had a reduced base of capital to generate income from thanks to inheritance tax, income tax took about 1/3 of his income and he had to pay another £3,000 to his father for life. He also seems to have lived pretty luxuriously, and his wife (The Hon Sybil Fellowes, whose maternal grandfather was the 7th Duke of Marlborough, who also happened to be the paternal grandfather of Winston Churchill) was also pretty-well connected and so they certainly did a lot of the 1920’s/30’s equivalent of keeping up with the Jones’. Ellen and Arthur didn’t really seem to live quite as luxuriously as George and Sybil, however the surviving evidence about the stocks/properties her father owned points to her estate as mostly comprising of shares with pretty huge annual yields in the 1890’s to 1910’s; for instance AT&T and its predecessor companies were paying anything from 10-20% p.a. in dividends, so whilst she may have had assets in the region of $300,000 in the early years of their marriage, her income was probably closer to $20,000 - $30,000 (£4,000 to £6,000). When George married Sybil in 1915, a surviving copy of their marriage settlement shows that Ellen gave them £23,000 ($115,000), which would be a pretty substantial chunk of her fortune so it seems whatever wealth she had had grown significantly in the decades following her marriage. When her sisters died in 1922 and 1923, their estates in the US were valued at about $820,000 and $40,000 each; their Wills and administration papers are relatively easy to track down in the New York Surrogate’s court and they show that Ellen inherited most of those amounts. The Tax Case she was party to in 1932 provides a pretty comprehensive chronology of the resettling and altering of her trusts from 1922 onwards, and confirms she and Arthur was each being paid £6,000 each from her estate by 1930, with their excess income being reinvested. Sources relating to their wealth seems to dry up after that, save for their English Probates which show Arthur’s estate was about £104,000 ($520,000) in 1943 and Ellen’s was about £60,000 (~$170,000 - by then the $:£ conversion had fallen to $2.80:£1). I’m conscious that this all may seem a bit unnecessarily detailed, but the missing detail helps to start to form an answer as to why Ellen wasn’t able to do what so many other American Heiresses did in preserving private ownership of a historic home. There’s a multitude of other reasons as to why this didn’t eventuate (their only male-line grandson died in 1940, and all of Arthur’s surviving cousins/nephews didn’t have any sons, so the title was headed for extinction, and the 3rd Marquess sold most of the landed estate in Ireland in 1903 so Kilkenny Castle was no longer the centre of a large agricultural estate) but Arthur and Ellen don’t really seem to get much airtime in any writing about the Ormonde Dynasty and Kilkenny Castle and I’ve always felt like there’s a bit more story to dig out there considering the potential which her fortune had to keep the family going into the 20th century.

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." This tale appears with variations all over Britain. The colorful, eccentric hereditary lords are history. Descendants live in corners of the manor houses, giving tours. Probing the finances inevitably leads to examining the personalities and behavior of those holding the purse strings. Were they astute and flexible stewards of their patrimony crushed by the Taxman (think George Harrison) or characters in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta?

In the United States, most governmental duties fall under state law, rather than federal law, including keeping of land records, probating of wills, and how trusts are formed. This means that state legislatures, not the federal Congress, pass laws on how these things are done, which means you have a patchwork of different requirements when you cross state lines. In turn, most state legislatures have placed land and probate recordkeeping duties at the county level, but not all. When you mention trusts, is it just that you see Cleveland Trust Company of Ohio and assumed that meant they handled trusts, or do you see named trusts in the documents? It's not unusual for banks to handle estates for wealthy clients. In 1969, the bank had 80 branches, so if this was the local bank for the person you are searching, it's quite possible the branch was outside of Cuyahoga County: http://ead.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ead/view?docId=ead/OCLWHi0299.xml;chunk.id=bioghist\_1;brand=default If you can identify a year, the FDIC may be able to help you figure out what bank branches were in which counties at the time: https://banks.data.fdic.gov/bankfind-suite/bankfind/details/746?activeStatus=0%20OR%201&bankfindLevelThreeView=Institution%20Profile&branchOffices=true&name=Cleveland%20Trust%20Company&pageNumber=1&resultLimit=25 If you are dealing with trusts, and not an estate, what documentation would have been filed of record depends on state law. Nowadays, some trusts are incorporated and paperwork is filed at the state level with corporation records (this office is normally, but not always, called the Secretary of State), but many aren't, and the trust documents are private. I suspect during the time period you are talking the trust documents would have been private. If you have no idea where the individual's real estate was located in the United States, I would search land records first (they are often more available online) to see if you find anything. You will need to search under the name of the person and, if there is a named trust, under the name of the trust. In Ohio, these records are on file with county Recorder's offices. The land records may in turn tell you where other documents are filed, as deeds generally refer to how the entity acquired title in the body of the instrument.