When asking clients about their children for estate planning purposes, men often joke that “these are the children…that I know of.” While that’s almost always intended to be funny, sometimes it is actually true. 

In the state of Ohio, a man’s biological children may have rights to inherit from the deceased man. But biological children are not always the same as a man’s legal heirs. In Ohio, if a man dies without a will but with children, biological offspring will only inherit through Ohio’s “no will inheritance structure” if the man had demonstrated awareness of the child’s or children’s existence before his death.