Channon's Estate

Citations

• 266 Pa. 417
• 109 A. 756
• 1920 Pa. LEXIS 584

Syllabus

<p>Wills — Probate—Witness—Disinterested witness — Cha/rity—Interest in charity — Property right — Pecuniary benefit — Act of April 26, 1855, P. L. 828, 882 — Odd Fellows Dome.</p> <p>1. Where a testator bequeaths a portion of his estate in remainder to the Odd Fellows’ Home, a witness to the will who is not interested as a legatee or devisee under the will, is not an interested witness witbin the meaning of the Act of April 26, 1855, P. L. 328, 332, merely because he is a member of the order of Odd Eel-lows, inasmuch as the parties concede the Odd Fellows’ Home is not a charity.</p> <p>2. Nor does such a witness derive “a pecuniary benefit or advantage from any part of the will,” where it appears that the various lodges of Odd Fellows, of one of which the witness was a member, had a right to place one out of each hundred of its members in the Odd Fellows’ Home as a resident, but that, in order to enter, the nominee must be voted in by his lodge, must be over' sixty years of age, unable to support himself, and have been a contributing member of his lodge for five consecutive years preceding his application for admission, and that the witness in question was only forty-nine years of age at the time he witnessed the will, and that although he was then a contributing member in good Standing, he was not and never had been an officer of the home, neither had he represented his lodge on the board of the institution, nor had any other connection with it. In such a case the witness did not possess, but simply had the capacity of attaining, the legal right to share in the benefits’ of the-home; and this, under the circumstances, is too remote an interest to disqualify him as an attesting witness, under the Act of 1855.</p> <p>3. Where the alleged disqualification arises from an interest in .a charity, the interest which will affect the capacity of an attesting witness must be in the nature of a direct property right in the testamentary fund, or such immediate, certain, close