Wood's Estate

Citations

• 247 Pa. 377
• 93 A. 483
• 1915 Pa. LEXIS 843

Syllabus

<p>Wills — Revocation—Cancellation—Will in testator’s possession —Declaration of testator — Evidence—Harmless error.</p> <p>1. Where in a contested will case it appeared that the will when found after testator’s death showed cross lines in ink through a bequest therein and testator’s widow, who was a competent witness, testified that in her presence testator had scratched out paragraphs in the will, mentioned the legatee named in a cancelled paragraph and stating that he had changed his intention to “take care of such legatee”; that the will was kept where testator and the witness were the only persons who had or could have access to it, but that the witness had never seen the face of the will until after her husband’s death, the fact that the envelope containing the will which the wife stated was sealed, was found at testator’s death to have been opened was insufficient to raise the presumption that testator had not cancelled the bequest, and the fact that a codicil dated more than two months after the period of the alleged cancellation made mention of the cancellation of other bequests, without saying anything about the cancellation of the gift in controversy and that the lines cancelling the bequests referred to in the codicil were of a different character from those cancelling the gift in controversy, were not conclusive proof that testator had not made such cancellations, and a finding that testator had drawn the lines through the bequest with intention to cancel it, was justified by the evidence.</p> <p>2. In such case evidence consisting of a letter purporting to have been written by the legatee of the cancelled bequest in controversy, wherein the statement that testator had said he was going to cut off the writer was made, was inadmissible, where it was shown to have been written by a person other than such legatee whose authority did not appear by sufficient proof, but was harmless error, there being other evidence sufficient to sustain the-findings of fact