Following is an excerpt from a fascinating article dealing with various “famous folks” wills. Ancestry.co.uk is posting 6 million English & Welsh wills running from 1861 to 1941. If you do a Google News search, you’ll come up with all kinds of articles about this. However, this exceprt is from the best one I could locate online – from the August 11, 2010 edition of the Daily Mail.
He was the enemy of capitalism and the author of The Communist Manifesto, so perhaps it’s
not surprising that Karl Marx died with just £250 to his name.
Although the German-born philosopher would be worth £23,000 in today’s money, Marx’s estate pales into insignificance alongside other famous names on newly released online documents.
Author Charles Dickens was worth the equivalent of £7.1 million by the time he died, and Charles Darwin left an estate worth £13 million in today’s money.
The names are some of six million English and Welsh wills from 1861 to 1941 which will be available online, and the total worth of the 6,079,000 estates catalogued tops what would be £20 billion in today’s money.
Read the full article in the August 11, 2010 edition of the Daily Mail.
