I went through many of my great and great-great-grandparents estate settlements when I was much younger, knew less about genealogy, and didn't bother to copy or read quite a bit of the material. In some cases, time never allowed me to go back, particularly on those families where other records allowed me to easily trace them back to earlier generations.
This time at the Family History Library, I've reviewed a few of those files and have picked up a few new clues and some neat documents I had forgotten existed.
The image on this post is part of a sale bill from the estate settlement of John Michael Trautvetter. His estate was interesting to view again, but there were no relevations in it.
However the estate of his uncle some forty years earlier contained one line I had overlooked that caused me to find out some members of the family had spent ten years in Kentucky after arriving from Germany and before coming to Illinois--something I was not aware of.
It pays to review files you may have scanned early in your research.