Not in court

[redbird]

This morning, I did not go out to Jamaica for a Surrogate's Court hearing.

I was informed about six weeks ago that a cousin of my father's had died without a will, and that I might be one of the heirs. The paperwork listed my father, my aunt Fran, and a cousin on the other side as first cousins, then noted me, my brother, and my father's widow as his heirs.

It turned out that in order to pursue a claim, I was supposed to produce a variety of paperwork, some of which was simple enough, and some of which would be difficult and expensive even if possible (my paternal grandfather's birth certificate, assuming he ever had one, in a specific form of certified-by-the-Russian-government copy, and a certified translation). On further investigation, it also appears that my brother and I aren't actually entitled to inherit, because my father's widow takes precedent. She died a few months ago, but her children inherit there, not us.

Given how tired I've been the last several weeks, it was almost a relief to discover that there was no reason for me to go down there (yes, in theory, I could have arranged to be in Jamaica at 9 a.m., if I got up early enough. Or we could have hired a lawyer to pursue this for us—for all I know, my aunt or my father's other cousin did so, but there seemed no point to my contacting them and suggesting we hire a joint lawyer. Had I heard from either of them, I'd probably have said sure, the same lawyer can act for all of us, but I decided after a week or so that I wasn't going to be the person pushing for something that they would definitely benefit from and I probably wouldn't.

I do intend to see a lawyer, but not about this except to the extent that it brought it to mind. I want to write a will; cattitude is automatically my heir under New York law, which is fine, but if he dies first (or we die in the hypothetical shared plane crash) after that would be my mother, who is in good health but thirty years older than me, and my brother, who is a nice person but not particularly close to me. And then an assortment of cousins. Partners I'm not married to, and other family of choice, don't come in there automatically; the state doesn't know about them or recognize those relationships. So I need to do this explictly. I think I should talk to a lawyer to make sure I get this right and don't wind up with people wasting lots of time and money in court one of these decades. (What I don't know, other than whether I need to explicitly say that yes, I know I have a brother and mother (and cousins?), but I want these people to inherit anyway, is how much identifying information I need to provide about my chosen family so the court doesn't make trouble about them proving they're the person of that name I'm talking about.) I looked at a Nolo Press book, but it's geared to certain specific, common situations, which mine doesn't seem to be: if you want to leave it all to one grandchild out of several, they'll help you, but non-biological kin you're not married to isn't in there. Maybe there's a book aimed at people in same-sex relationships that will help.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Belatedly remembering that "Jamaica" is the name of a section of Queens.

Damn: for a moment there it looked like you were in for a really colorful day.

Seriously, your plans to be will-ful sound wise.

[redbird]

Right. I should have clarified that.

When I was a child, I was puzzled by ads for vacations in Jamaica: it was a nice place to live, but I couldn't see why they would be advertising it as an exotic destination. Eventually I sorted out that they didn't mean where I was. (Our address was in "Jamaica, N.Y., 11435" though the post office would have delivered to "Queens, N.Y." or even "Briarwood, N.Y." (Well, they might have given the mail to the people on the next street down, because our letter carrier seemed to occasionally be confused about 87th Avenue and 87th Road, but that's a separate issue and one that wouldn't have been improved by fiddling with the Queens/Jamaica/Briarwood thing.) I'm sorry, it's clearly past my bedtime.)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Today, on my continuing quest for branch libraries, I drove past Walnut Avenue and Walnut Boulevard, which are in quite different parts of the city of Walnut Creek, CA, which in turn should not be confused with Walnut, CA, which is in a totally different part of the state. (We also have Monterey and Monterey Park, Portola and Portola Valley, Woodland and Woodland Hills, and other such pairs, in each case the pair being hours and hours drive apart.)

[redbird]

The difficulty in Queens is that 87th Avenue and 87th Road (or any other nth Ave. and Rd., and sometimes also nth Drive) are parallel and a block apart, meaning that the same house number on the similar-named streets will usually be in the same zip code and often handled by the same letter carrier. The advantage is that it was no big deal for one of my parents to periodically walk down to the next block, ring the bell, give them their misdelivered mail, and get ours. (I assume the other people did some of the walking, but I don't know.)

As a naming scheme for "someone laid out a grid, then someone else decided they wanted the blocks closer together," this is probably better than lots of fractional street numbers, along the lines of Washington, D.C.'s 13 1/2 Street.

There are also numbered "Streets" and sometimes "Places" (again, infill), but they run north-south to the avenues/roads/drives' east-west. There are some named streets, a mix of boulevards running at odd angles to the grid and a few that just seem to have been snuck in somewhere, like the string of plant names in Flushing and the Hoover and Coolidge several blocks north of where we lived. No rhyme or reason: some old named streets were handed numbers instead when the grid was laid out, and some streets got names rather than numbers despite the grid's existence.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

In Britain, and I appreciate this is useless information but I know nothing about US law, you go to a solicitor and say you want to make a will, and you tell them exactly who you want to inherit what in what order, and they ask questions to clarify situations like residuals and then they make a will for you and charge forty pounds. With people's names they tend to say "of Kingston, Ontario" or whatever, for clarification in case of problems, but they don't query or expect people have to be relatives.