This paper is on politics of record production concerning the dead in the Ottoman Empire. From the seventeenth century on, the Ottoman administration developed new mechanisms for inventorying estates (namely properties, debts and credit as well as bequests) of wealthy men and women, including - but not only - office and contract holders. These inventories were prepared by a group of scribes, trained and appointed by the fiscal administration. The main aim of the scribes was to collect the debt of the deceased to the state as a result of their contracts and offices. After the news of the death of a wealthy person reached to the capital, a scribe was sent to the locality where the person died. He met with the local authorities, sealed the estate; appraised the value of the movable and immovable properties; collected information from the locals about the usufruct rights, boundaries and values; figured out debt and credits of the deceased, including the debt to the state; and organized public auctions to liquidate the estate, if necessary. All these activities required different techniques of reckoning and value assessment strategies and as well as intense negotiations with the heirs of the deceased, debtors and creditors, and local communities. Debtors and creditors could number hundreds sometimes thousands, depending on the debt-credit relations of the deceased. Since many of the wealthy men and women were involved in tax-farming contracts in this period, rural and urban communities might be debtors to the deceased as collectivities. Often, the standard parameters of the law of inheritance was not adequate to settle the estate and there was a vast room for negotiations how to settle and apportion the estate, restructure the debts and credits. In these postmortem settlements, different parties (including the state) developed different strategies to maximize their receivable or minimize their debts. In these post-mortem disputes, the scribes prepared documents, which were also considered legal inheritance records, reflecting these disputes and strategies. Different parties intended to be involved in the document production process, tried to make claims with the documents in their hands, and incorporate their voices in the text of the final probate inventories. The probate inventories, therefore were not solely lists of properties and liabilities; they were textual grounds for post-mortem contestation.