Excerpt from Surrogate's Court, County of New York: In the Matter of Proving the Last Will and Testament of Henry Parish, Deceased, November 10, 1857Or habitation. He was thus the master of his own fortune in every sense. He had made it himself. He was not its servant under any of the controling ties or affections which sometimes bind men to their property. But he was also, in a most remarkable degree, in a position of entire independence, and able to follow the bent of his own will and preference in the disposition of this property. He had nobody dependent upon him. He had no children who, by a law generally too strong for even prudence, wisdom or the true consultation of their interests - the law of affection and the law of succession, draw a man's property to them. No one of his relatives of his own blood were in any circumstances of either dependence, of necessity or of just expectation, not one. I mean such just expectation as was founded upon any relation he had ever held, or any suggestion that he had ever made, either authorizing or encouraging any expectation from him. His sister, who was unmarried, possessed, in the distribution of her father's estate, some or and she was past the period of life when the connection of marriage was to be looked for. The other sister, possessing the same fortune, was married to an independent gentleman holding a place of honor and of trust in the magistracy of the State, abundantly able, out of his own unaided resources, to maintain the fortune and the dignity of the married sister of Mr. Parish and of their children. The brother James, of whom we really know very little, but apparently about as much as Henry Parish did for the last ten or twelve years of his life, lived up the river in Poughkeepsie. What he was whether a farmer or a trader, whether the resident of a village what his position was, except that he was retired and quite unobtrusive, and that he possessed an adequate and independent property by acquisition from his father, and that he had received pecuniary benefits at times from his brother Henry, we know nothing distinctly. He seems to have been in that independent condition of.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.