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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op here. At the time of the writing of the will, my godmother and my grandma both sat with a lawyer and had the will written and verified. [/quote]

Why was your grandmother with her sister when the will was written?

[b]Who was holding the will at the time of Thelma's death?[/b]
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So, Larla's grandmother goes with her sister Thelma to a lawyer's office and when the meeting is over, Thelma is leaving her family home to her sister's granddaughter instead of to her own two children.

This sounds like the plot of a tv detective show. An older woman dies and leaves her home to a great niece instead of her own children. The children go to a lawyer to find out if there is any way to challenge this surprising will. The lawyer hires a detective who tracks down the lawyer who wrote the will five years before Thelma passed away. At the end, there is a dramatic courtroom scene where the lawyer who wrote the will is called to the stand and is asked who said what when Thelma and her sister were sitting in his office on the day he wrote Thelma's will. What will the judge decide?

If I were Mary or Roy, I'd be asking a lot of questions and consulting a lawyer about this situation, before too much time has passed. 
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I think the facts surrounding the writing of the will definitely give Mary and Roy an opening to challenge it.[/quote]

I think there's enough possibility that something is off here that Mary and Roy should see a lawyer. We don't really know enough because we are only hearing the facts from Larla's perspective. A lawyer can look at the will and find out more about the circumstances from the lawyer who wrote the will. Maybe there's a basis to challenge the will, maybe there's not, but they should get legal advice from an objective professional to find out.

This isn't about sympathy/hostility toward Mary or whether she should be punished/rewarded for her choices/possible mental health problems. A will is a legal document and there are rules about how a will is written. Mary and Roy need to find out if there was anything unusual about the situation surrounding their mother's will that indicate that the will is not a good one.

Do Mary and Roy know that Larla's grandmother accompanied their mother to the lawyer's office to have her will written? The fact that Larla's grandmother was there and ended up being named executor for the will which leaves a valuable asset to her own granddaughter raises at least a yellow flag. The circumstances do lend themselves to the question of whether Thelma was influenced by her sister to leave her family home to the great niece rather than to her own children. 
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Who had copies of the will when Thelma died? Did Mary and Roy both have copies in advance? Did Thelma's sister have a copy? Did Larla or her parents have a copy?

Did Mary and Roy know ahead of time that their mother's sister would be the executor?

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What about the last questions here? Do you know the answers to any of these, OP?

I don't think anyone thinks Thelma's hand was dragged across a signature line- that's not usually how undue influence works.

Also, if your great aunt was so wealthy, where is the rest of the money going? You've accounted for $100,000 each to Mary and Roy, the house(worth $400,000) plus $25,000 to you, and then another $30,000 to each grandson. Who is getting the rest of the estate?

Did she buy the house on her own without her husband ever paying any of the down payment or monthly mortgage? Did he not leave her anything at all?
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1.  The lawyer and my grandmother had copies of the will. 
2. My parents and I didn't even know anything was being left to me so now we did not have copies.
3.  The rest of the money from her estate  is doled out to other family members and a few charities. 
4. Yes my godmother was wealthy on her own, she owned the house before she married her husband so no I don't believe he had any stake in it.[/quote]

I think it is fishy that Thelma and her sister were the only family members that had copies of the will, and that the lawyer advised making another elderly person the executor of the will. In my family, all the kids have copies of our elderly parents' wills, the same for my cousins with their parents' wills. I also know that my parents were advised to make one or two of their children the executors, because they are more likely to be around, even if my parents live to be 100.

The optics of this is that it looks like Thelma's sister went to the lawyer with her and maybe talked her into leaving the family home to Larla, the sister's granddaughter, over Thelma's own children. Did your grandmother maybe feel that the house should now go to her side of the family? Did Thelma ever buy out her sister's share of the house? Did your parents have all the extra people living at your house at the time the will was written?

This is a very complicated situation and it is clear your side of the family does not really like Mary and Roy very much. It might be hard to understand when you're 25, but losing your mother is a very traumatic event in one's life, even if your relationship was not very close and had problems. I'd say it is even more difficult to deal with when you've had a problematic relationship.

No matter how old we get, we still need the love of our mothers. When your mother dies, it is a comfort to know that she loved you and she knew that you loved her.  It can have deep longterm effects on a person to feel unloved by one's own mother. Mary and Roy must feel right now as though their mother turned her back on them one final time and essentially said that she doesn't love them. That is devastating feeling for a person to have and it is hard to imagine why a mother would allow that to happen.  I can't even imagine the extent of the sadness mary and Roy must be feeling, and then on top of that, to have a distant relative taking there family home on top of that.

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