How this data is made

Only the court’s published probate notices: the notices to creditors, notices of administration and the other notices a probate case requires to be published. Each is the estate’s own public statement, printed because the law requires it, and read as it was published, not copied from a summary of it.

Every notice is read from an ordinary request, as a member of the public would read it. A notice that sits behind a login, a paywall or a CAPTCHA is not read.

Not every notice that names “the estate of” someone is a probate notice. A lawsuit against a decedent’s heirs over a debt, for example, names the estate without opening one, and is left out. Only a notice in a decedent’s probate case becomes a record.

From each printing we keep what it prints: the decedent’s name and any name they were also known by, the county and the court, the case number, the date of death and the decedent’s last residence where the notice gives them, the kind of notice, the date it was first published, every personal representative with the mailing address printed, and the estate’s attorney with the firm, phone, email, address and bar number printed.

A value the notice does not print is dropped, never guessed. “Not printed in the notice” on a record means exactly that: nothing is estimated, and nothing is filled in from elsewhere.

A notice to creditors runs on consecutive weeks, so one estate is usually several printings. They are one record when they share a case number within a county; a case number is compared without its punctuation and leading zeros, so “2026-CP-000042” and “26CP42” are the same file. A notice that prints no case number is matched on the decedent’s name and date of death instead, and one that prints neither cannot be told apart from the next, so it is not published.

Where printings differ, the newest one that states a field wins, so a corrected notice supersedes the first. The first publication is the earliest date any printing gives.

Each record’s claims deadline is its first publication plus the state’s window for creditor claims. In Florida that is 3 months from the first publication of the notice to creditors (Fla. Stat. 733.702(1)). A state is added only once its window has been read from the statute; where it has not, a record carries no deadline rather than a guessed one.

The deadline is when ordinary creditors must file; a creditor entitled to direct notice may have longer, and the window says nothing about when the estate will sell property. Records whose window closes within 14 days are flagged.

Notices are read the day they are published, folded into their estates, and the county and state counts are recomputed after each day’s notices. Alerts go out after that, so an estate whose notice ran yesterday reaches a daily alert this morning and a weekly one the next Monday.

Every county and state with an estate on record has a page, and every page is linked. Only the ones with enough to say are submitted to search engines: a county page is published once eight estates in it have first published a notice in the last 90 days, and withdrawn only below five. The gap is deliberate; on one threshold a small county would enter and leave the sitemap week by week.

The verdict is recomputed after every refresh and stored, so a page, the sitemap and the history of what we asked to be indexed all read the same answer. Estate records themselves are never submitted: they are behind sign-in.

• The court file. The will, the petition, the letters of administration and the inventory are kept by the clerk of court. A record carries the case number to ask for them.
• Whether the estate owns real property. A notice rarely says what the estate holds. Check the county’s property records under the decedent’s name and last residence.
• Estates that never publish a notice. Some small estates are settled without one, and property that passes outside probate (joint ownership, a trust) leaves no probate notice at all.
• What happens next. Whether the heirs sell, keep or dispute a house is not in any notice, and a sale of estate property may need the court’s approval.
• Counties and states we do not read yet. A county appears here the morning its first estate is read; the state pages list every county we hold.

We are not a court, a clerk or a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. The court file governs every estate. Questions about the data go to support; questions about an estate go to its attorney or the clerk of court.