The statutory order in which a person's property passes when they die without a valid will - a default set by the state, not by the family.
When someone dies without a valid will, their estate does not go unclaimed and it is not divided by agreement. Each state has a statute setting out who inherits and in what order, and that statute applies whatever the family believes the person would have wanted. The order typically runs to a surviving spouse and children first, then to parents, then to more distant relatives, with the shares fixed by the statute.
The complications are usually structural rather than exotic. Blended families interact with these rules in ways that surprise people, because the statutory shares between a spouse and children from an earlier relationship are set by formula. Unmarried partners generally inherit nothing under intestacy no matter how long the relationship lasted. And adopted, step- and half-relations are each treated by specific statutory provisions that do not always match ordinary usage of those words.
A large part of what people own may never reach the intestacy rules at all. Assets with a named beneficiary or a survivorship feature - retirement accounts, life insurance, jointly held property, accounts payable on death - pass outside the estate by their own terms. That is why an intestate estate and "everything the person owned" are frequently very different things, and why a stale beneficiary designation can override the statute entirely.
The obvious use of advice is to avoid intestacy in the first place. Where a death has already happened without a will, the questions worth asking early are who has authority to act, what actually falls inside the estate once beneficiary-designated assets are set aside, and whether any deadline is running for creditor claims or for a surviving spouse's statutory elections - those deadlines exist in every state and they do not wait for the family to agree.
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