Hiring a lawyer to change one line in a will means an appointment, an hourly clock, and a bill in the mail. Updating a will you built yourself in WillMaker Online means opening the saved file, editing the part that changed, and reprinting the page. That gap is the whole reason I moved my widowed mother's estate planning to the kitchen table instead of a law office, and it is the first thing I tell anyone asking how to redo a parent's DIY legal forms after a spouse dies. Her old will still named my father on nearly every line, so the update was mostly a matter of finding those lines, reassigning them, and re-signing under the state's rules so it holds up in Indiana probate.
A widowed neighbor named Garnet Tidwell emailed me this exact list after his wife died, and he wanted plain answers before he would trust any tool that charges a monthly fee. They are the same questions that reach the reference desk, so I will take them in the order people really ask. For me they were one more shelf in the long job of organizing legal documents after a parent passes away.
Does she need a new will, or just an edit?
The first thing people ask is whether a widow needs a brand-new will or can just bolt a change onto the old one. My answer, for most modest households, is a fresh will. A codicil (the legal version of a stick-on note) has to agree perfectly with the document it changes, and a will written for a two-income marriage rarely agrees with a widow's reality. When the old will names a spouse who has died on line after line, a patch breeds more contradictions than it clears, and contradictions are what turn a quiet filing into a probate fight. Her estate is modest, a suburban house, some savings, and a basement tenant whose lease we had already put on paper with a simple rental agreement for a basement tenant with LawDepot, so a clean single document beat a patchwork every time.
One judgment call worth keeping: if the only change were a single small gift, a codicil could carry it. When the change is that the main beneficiary is gone, start over. A fresh will revokes every earlier version and leaves exactly one active copy on the shelf, which is the whole point.
The two-witness rule, and the notary myth in Indiana
Here is the one people get backwards. Indiana does not require a notary to make a will legally valid. A will with the person's signature and two proper witnesses is complete without any notarization at all. Two witnesses watch her sign, she watches them sign, and the will is real. In desk language, the witness clause is just two neighbors who will sign with you over coffee.
Notarizing is an optional, separate step some people add for other reasons, not a requirement for validity. The mistake I see most is folks assuming a will is worthless until a notary stamps it, then scrambling for one on a Sunday afternoon. For basic validity in Indiana, you do not need it. Two witnesses, both watching, both signing. Get that right and the core document stands on its own.
What the beneficiary worksheet actually handles
The beneficiary worksheet is the part of WillMaker where every person who inherits gets their own line, and beside each line, the share or the item meant for them. Picture it as the catalog record for the estate: one entry per name, each with its own call number. In a first will you fill it from scratch. In a widow's update, most of the work is subtraction, because the late spouse usually sits at the top of nearly every line.
My mother's old worksheet sent almost everything to my father first, then to my brother and me only if he was already gone. With him gone, those "if he is gone" branches had to become the main road. The worksheet makes that visible. You open each entry, remove the person who has died, and decide who now stands first.
Before touching a single line, do this: list every beneficiary the old will named, and mark which ones leaned on the deceased spouse. The lines that named him only as backup are fine. The lines that named him first are the ones that misfire if you skip them. Work that list top to bottom and the worksheet stops being intimidating.
Reprinting and re-signing in WillMaker Online
Changing the file itself is the least dramatic part. You reopen the saved WillMaker Online interview, walk back to the sections that changed, and edit them the way you first entered them. The program runs like a long reference interview: instead of "what kind of mystery do you like," it asks "who should get the house," and you change your answer and move on. When the answers are set, it rebuilds the whole document clean.
You do not hand-edit the paper. Marking up a printed will with a pen is not how you update it. You change the answer in the file, print a fresh version, and sign that one. Then comes the part no software can do, the signing itself: two witnesses, in the room, pens out. That small ceremony is what turns a printout into a will, and it runs the same whether the draft came from a lawyer or a laptop.
Assets a will never touches
Not everything moves through the will, and knowing what does not saved us real confusion. Her house and car pass by other routes, like a transfer-on-death deed, which sits outside the will entirely. The same round of paperwork meant refreshing her durable power of attorney too, a separate document that rides in the red accordion folder I keep marked for her work, not mine. My father's final tax return was its own job, handled elsewhere, and the will has nothing to do with it.
As for the notarized page people keep asking about, I recognized the Indiana self-proving clause on page three the instant it printed, from a FAQ I had bookmarked, and I leave the how and why of it to the piece that covers it. The point I gave Garnet is the one I will give you: a will is a single document in a stack, not the whole stack, so do not expect it to move the house or settle the taxes.
When DIY legal forms aren't enough
The kitchen table has a ceiling, and it is worth naming out loud. Before any software, I tried to get my mother onto a pro bono legal clinic's list; the wait ran three months, longer than her questions could sit, and that dead end is what pointed us at the software to begin with. That does not mean software fits every case.
A large estate, a blended family with competing claims, a trust that needs real structure: those earn a professional's hours, and I say so without flinching. For a widow with a modest home, a basement tenant, and two kids to name, the DIY legal forms did exactly the job the will needed, the same lesson I keep relearning as the kitchen table attorney.
Lenora Grady, who has split a break-room fridge shelf with me longer than either of us will admit, said it best when a patron asked whether any of this was really allowed: "It's your will, not a library book, and nobody charges a late fee for keeping it a while." Know which category you are in, and the rest is data entry and two steady signatures.