Estate of Claghorn

Citations

• 181 Pa. 608
• 37 A. 921
• 1897 Pa. LEXIS 588

Syllabus

<p>Statute of limitations — Decedents' estates — Executors and administrators.</p> <p>The recognition by the personal representative of a decedent of a debt of the decedent barred by the statute of limitations by part payment thereon is but a new promise on which the representative must be sued personally. He is not answerable in his representative capacity for any cause of action not created by the decedent himself. If he revives the cause of action by a new promise, then the promise is essentially a new contract, which alone can be relied on to sustain the action.</p> <p>Where a creditor of a decedent has been induced by the executors who are the sole legatees of the decedent to delay pressing his claim for more than six years, another creditor may plead the statute of limitations against the claim, although the executors may be estopped from pleading it: McWilliams’s Appeal, 117 Pa. Ill, distinguished.</p> <p>Fraud — Decedents' estates — Statute of limitations.</p> <p>A decedent in his lifetime received money from K. to be invested, and he, in his lifetime and his executors after his death, repeatedly, in the most explicit terms, represented to K. that her money was invested, and informed her of the special securities taken in her name. These statements were all false. K. did not discover the fraud until more than six years had expired from decedent’s death, jleld, that no other creditor of the decedent could successfully interpose the statute as against K., because her claim against the estate dated only from her discovery of the fraud.</p>