A woman sued a man alleging that the latter owed a debt to her deceased husband. While testifying, she listed the heirs of the deceased, including herself, and their relationship to him. When questioned, the defendant acknowledged the debt but denied everything else. Then the plaintiff produced witnesses who corroborated her account of her late husband’s heirs, thereby establishing their standing in the legal record. Cases of this sort appear frequently in the inheritance registers of the Sharia Courts of al-Mansura and al-Daqahliyya province in Egypt from the 1860s through the 1890s. Often the debt involved was trivial. Why sue, as one widow did, for a one-eighth share of ten piasters (1 ¼ piasters), when her court costs exceeded two piasters? The answer is that suits such as these were a strategy to establish the identity of heirs omitted from the legal record: the woman’s share of her late husband’s estate came to 892 piasters. Later ethnographic studies suggest that conflicts between multiple wives and the children of different mothers often resulted in the collusion of some heirs to exclude others. In Hanafi jurisprudence, which was applied in the Egyptian Sharia Courts at the time, the rules governing conflicting testimony (ta‘arud al-bayyinat, ikhtilaf al-shihadat) are quite complicated. Comparatively speaking, a suit to collect a debt was a simpler way to correct the record than attempting to prove the fraudulent exclusion of one or more heirs. This paper draws on court records and fatwas from late nineteenth-century Egypt, juridical texts, and recent legal and social studies. It shows that Sharia Court entries, including probate inventories, are not necessarily a transparent record of social life – one has to ask what is not mentioned. It also demonstrates that while legal theory can be understood through the study of juridical compendia, explications, and commentaries, one must also study fatwa collections and court records to apprehend how the law was applied in everyday life. Last, it highlights the agency of disadvantaged individuals (often women and children) in asserting their rights within the legal system.