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108 Ala. 209

Jackson v. Wood

Supreme Court of Alabama

Decided November 15, 1895

Supreme Court of Alabama · decided 1895-11-15

Appel from Talladega Probate Court. Tried before Hon. G. K. Miller. On December 13th, 1893, the appellee, Susan Wood, as executrix of the will of her deceased husband, John H. L. Wood, filed her accounts and vouchers for a final settlement of her administration, the estate having been previously declared insolvent. Upon such settlements, the appellant and certain other creditors of the estate objected to the following credits claimed by the executrix.

Relies on McNeill's Adm'r v. McNeill's Creditors · Shelton v. Carpenter · McDonald v. Carnes

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1895-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently November 1932

3 state decisions

1018951900191019201930decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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McOLELLAN, J.

¶1On the principle that when two names are signed to a note the prima facie presumption is that the subscribers’ are co-makers and equally bound, the probate court erred in allowing the executrix credit for the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars which, having been paid by Frank Wood on a note for five hundred dollars signed by the testator and himself, she refunded to said Frank Wood, (2 Daniel on negotiable instruments 1336 ; Summerhill v. Tapp, 52 Ala. 277), in the absence of proof that the parties were not comakers.

¶2The credit claimed by the executrix for payment made to M. T. Singleton for the expenses incident to the last illness and burial of the testator was contested by the creditors. The only evidence of the correctness of this item of credit offered in the court below was the ex parte affidavit of said Singleton. The credit should not have been allowed, after contestation, upon such evidence.— Jenks v. Terrell, 73 Ala. 238 ; McDonald v. Carnes, 90 Ala. 147.

¶3The court also erred in .allowing the executrix credit' fpr the several debts, not of a preferred class’, which she; *211paid in full. These creditors, as the event proved, were only entitled to share pro rata with others in the assets of the insolvent estate, and their payment in full by the executrix was made at her own peril. She is only entitled on account of these payments to be ‘ ‘substituted for the creditors whose claims she has thus discharged, as a claimant against the insolvent estate, and to take the same distributive share to which- those creditors would have been entitled.—Hearin, Admr. v. Savage, Admr. 16 Ala. 286, 294 ; McNeill’s Admr. v. McNeil’sl Creditors, 36 Ala. 109, 116 ; Shelton v. Carpenter, et al. 60 Ala. 201, 213.

¶4Reversed and^remanded.

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