Scholars of Ottoman court registers (sicils) have noticed the standardization of legal documents across the Empire, as well as a certain degree of uniformity in the manners in which judges dealt with legal cases. However, the regional diversity of the legal practices has also been observed, especially between those that existed in Istanbul and in the provinces, and between those in Anatolia and in the Arab regions. Thus, it may be asked whether the legal practices also differed among the towns in Anatolia, which were closely integrated into the Istanbul-centered system of judicial administration. This paper focuses on three Anatolian towns, namely Ankara, Tokat, and Aintab, during the late eighteenth century, and compares their respective solutions to the issue of missing husbands and deserted wives. Because a deserted wife virtually could not remarry according to the orthodox Hanafi interpretation of shari‘a, some legal devices were adopted to formulate a practical solution on site. By also referring to the opinions of the Ottoman Sheyhülislâms, the relationship between law-making in the imperial center and legal practices at the local level will be explored through this case study. An examination of the court records in three towns reveals that in all of the cases reviewed, the court validated the husband’s death by accepting witnesses or informants and consequently approved the wife’s remarriage, but the procedures for this validation varied. Noticeably, one judge who served in both Ankara and Tokat dealt with the matters differently in each location. The regional diversity is significant, given the fact that the mid-seventeenth-century Sheyhülislâm had already issued a fetva (fatwa) that sanctioned the acceptance of informants concerning the missing husband’s death, which was included in his widely-read fetva collection. I argue that the short tenure of judges—often less than a year during the eighteenth century—led to the increasing role of the court scribes of local origin in shaping and maintaining local legal practices.