Old legal and record term 1600s-1800s
What does now wife mean in an old will?
In a will, my now wife simply names the wife living at the writing; drafters used it to keep a bequest from passing to any later wife. Tradition says it proves an earlier marriage; it does not. It hints, and the proof has to come from marriage and burial records. You will meet it in wills, mostly 1600s-1800s.
Where it appears: wills.
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Related terms
Browse the full genealogy records glossary for more occupations, causes of death, and legal terms.
FAQs
Where will I see now wife in the records?+
Mostly in wills, 1600s-1800s. Clerks abbreviated freely and spelling wandered, so expect variant wordings around it.
Do these old terms still matter for family history?+
Yes, a single word can settle a relationship. Relict names a widow, et ux hides an unnamed wife, natural son points at a parent. The words are dry, but what they encode about a family is not.
Where do these definitions come from?+
They are drawn from period dictionaries, government archive glossaries, and standard genealogy references, cross-checked against each other; provenance is documented with the dataset. Inside AncestorIQ, Deep Research reads the record itself and explains terms like this in context, against your ancestor's own document.
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