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204 Ga. 747

51 S.E.2d 797

Bryant v. Bryant

Supreme Court of Georgia

Decided February 15, 1949

Supreme Court of Georgia · decided 1949-02-15

Relies on Jones v. Habersham

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1949-02-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2004

8 state decisions

301949195019601970198019902000decided

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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Atkinson, Presiding Justice.

¶1 The sole contention is that the will here involved, devising and bequeathing all of the testatrix’s, property to a named person, is invalid on the ground that the-legatee’s wife, one of -three subscribing witnesses, was incompetent as such. The common law provided that the spouse of a legatee was not competent to act as an attesting witness to the execution of a will. 57 Am. Jur. p. 240, § 315; Caesar v. Burgess, 103 Fed. 2d, 503, 507, et cit.; 25 A. L. R. 305. However, under the Witness Act of 1866 (Ga. L. 1866, p. 138; Code, § 38-1603 et seq.) and the provisions of the Code then and now existing as to the attestation and probate of wills, no person is disqualified from being a subscribing witness by reason of interest. Jones v. Habersham, 63 Ga. 146. The provision of the Code, § 113-304, that a husband may be a witness to a will by which a legacy is given to his wife, first appeared in the Code of 1863 as § 2386, prior to the Married Woman’s Act of 1866 (Ga. L. 1866, pp. 146, 147; Code, § 53-502), and changed the common law above mentioned so as to render the husband, though not the wife,, competent as a subscribing witness to a will under which the spouse is a legatee, but since the Witness Act of 1866, supra, she-is likewise competent. Accordingly, the judgment sustaining the: *748 general demurrer to the motion to set aside the probate of the will must be affirmed.

¶2 Judgment affirmed.

All the Justices concur.
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