FAIRFIELD
COUNTY SOUTH CAROLINA
WILLS SERIES
These
are copies of the original wills for Fairfield County, South Carolina. This is a joint project with the Fairfield
County Historical Museum and the Fairfield County Library. This is the official will record as recorded
by the court, which is not
the entire, or even the most important, of the Fairfield Probate Records. The records are from microfilm rolls provided
by the museum and library.
If
you do not find what you are looking for, do not despair. First off, there are more estate records in
the loose chancery records for both Kershaw and Fairfield Counties. Those of Kershaw were inherited from the old
Camden District / Craven County, and those estates (pre-1787) are in that
county’s records. Also, Fairfield has
loose estate packages that date from ca1784, and are indexed on microfilm and
in the publication “Index of Probate Records for Fairfield County, SC
1784-1860” by the deceased only.
Additionally, Fairfield had a separate Equity Court for cases involving
land and movables, which typically involved heirship
disputes. These are abstracted and
indexed in “Fairfield County Equity Court Records, 1807-1870”. Contact the Fairfield Museum for these two
publications. Lastly, the detailed
Probate Records, covering things like inventories, appraisements, administrator
bonds, settlements & etc., have been digitized and are hosted at: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1911928. And if that wasn’t enough, there are numerous
other specialty volumes listed at the LDS
Library Catalogue. The will volumes
are simply that – just the wills. They
cover a small percentage of the total estates, but they are nonetheless one of
the key information sources for the county.
The
files are in .tif format and are best viewed in an
imaging application. This particular
project is based on IrFanView, available for free at:
If you install this application, it will add it as a browser plug-in and will auto-invoke when you click any of the below links.
The
images are best viewed in 256 color at least, and best in the full 16.7m color
scale, to allow the widest range of grayscale.
If you view it in 16 color, it comes out dark.
Will Books
Please
note – quality varies dramatically. Most
images are readable, but some pages in some volumes are extremely faded. The scanned images are the best that could be
obtained.