Can you please tell us what benefit there would be to having unsigned wills kept with family members in case of emergency?I'm wondering specifically about tornadoes and the loss of a will.Would an unsigned will/copy of a will count after a person's death?

When my father died when i was about 12 yrs old, i remember my mom taking us to the bank because she had to get into their 'safe deposit box'..oh it was HORRIBLE!! . she was crying , the president and another 'administrator' wouldn't let her TOUCH the box ( she said she was stupid in telling them her husb just died and she had to get into it to get papers , if she'd not SAID ANYTHING they wouldn't have known til later when the obit was in the paper , so she had time to empty it out on her own ) ...those 2 men stood there, went thru everything, wouldn't let her have anything or touch anything until days later - after they sorted thru things, as they put it. . and luckily for us, ,, they wanted to throw out a piece of paper that looked old . . that piece of paper was the deed to 1500 acres of land in another county that had my mom's name on it . . she stuffed the paper in her pocket - since they thought it was 'trash' ...and ended up selling all the land to a neighbor, that was the ONLY money we had to live on for weeks, til she was able to use the car. . .and use the checkbook . . back then, a woman was not allowed to drive the family car or use the checkbook if her husb died !!!!!. (thankfully those rules finally changed) but lucky for me, at an early age, my brother and i learned quickly about banks. . . and have NOTHING TO DO with any type of stupid boxes at a bank ... it's none of THIER business what you put in there but we don't use those things at all, we don't want our important papers, becoming 'their ' property.

I don't know if this is still true, but at one time I recall reading about going to a lawyer and setting up a nominee corporation for the sole purpose of opening a safe deposit box. The corporation would be the name in which the box was rented and the only place any individual names would be is on the signature cards. This would keep prying eyes out of it.

What DO you do with the original if you do not have a lawyer? We've never had a lawyer.