ABSTRACT
Probate records have for some decades been perused by historians who investigate standards of living and consumption patterns, household economy, agricultural development, systems of inheritance, transmission of property, debts, and material culture. In Iceland, these sources have been used in studies on book ownership, cultural differences among farmers and housing conditions, and some specimens have been published in scholarly editions. Probate protocols became obligatory in Iceland as late as in 1769, almost a hundred years later than in other parts of the Realm of Denmark-Norway. Almost immediately, though, an efficient system was established and from the period 1770 to 1900 over 30,000 detailed post-mortem inventories and partitions of inheritance are preserved that allow a thorough study of private property and its transmission between generations. In this article, an overview will be provided on the creation and preservation of these sources with some elementary statistics on the probate population according to gender, age, and regions, besides a preliminary discussion of the worth of estates, revealing the everyday workings of a society mired in poverty but nonetheless vibrant and dynamic on its own account.
