So in the earlier installments of this story we had Matthew Greer dying in Great Neck, NY in 1936 and leaving his $ 10,000 estate to his niece Jennie Zweifel.

His sister Sarah Mahan was not mentioned at all in part 2 but some of you may have noticed her name in the tags. So what does Sarah have to do with it?

There was a family story about a dispute over Matthew’s money involving Sarah, so I kept looking for more. I find old newspapers to be wonderful information sources. So right now I have 2 subscriptions for old newspapers sites – GenealogyBank.com and Newpapers.com . There are also some free resources and one of them paid off this time.

I found this on Fulton history, also called Old Fulton NY Postcards. The website is a great resource for genealogy but has a misleading name. You might mistakenly think it just deals with Fulton NY history or postcards or both but it actually has a large collection of historic newspapers. And it is free.

Here is a link to a full-screen copy of the news story pictured at left. The story is from THE NASSAU DAILY REVIEW of NOVEMBER 18, 1936 which I found on Old Fulton NY Postcards.

The short version of the story is than Jennie benefited from the first will but a second will was found that left everything to Sarah. This second will was upheld after a law suit between aunt and niece.

I’ll be doing a bit of work in the coming weeks to try flesh this out and see if I can learn a bit more on Matthew Greer. This estate business is interesting but I hope investigating it further will lead me to learning more about what happened to Matthew Greer between his arrival in New York in 1883 and his death in 1936.