Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in North Carolina

What was the order of death here? I need to know specifically when people died. I also need to know if your parents or brother had a will.

Assuming that everyone here lived in NC (your parents and sibling) and that nobody had a will, this would be as follows:

father's assets would pass to mother. She would get approximately 1/3 of the real property and the first $30,000 of property plus 1/3rd of the balance. However, this relates only to probate assets. Life insurance, joint bank accounts or land owned as a tenancy by the entireties with your father are all no-probate assets. The children would inherit the other 2/3 of real and personal property. When mother died, the children would then inherit whatever mother had left.

You indicate that a sibling died. If he died after the father but before the mother, his share of father's estate would pass as per his will or to his spouse (if any) and children in the same proportions (1/3rd to spouse and 2/3rd to children). When mother died, her share would pass to her 2 surviving children and the grandchildren would take the share of their deceased father.

However, if anyone had a will, then assets would pass as per the will.

If your father had a will, then he probably left all his assets to your mother. If the mother had a will, she may have left everything equally to her children. If one of her children died before her leaving 2 grandchildren, then the anti-lapse statute in NC provides that the grandchildren would inherit the share of their deceased parent, assuming that these children are the legitimate biological or adopted descendants of the mother and sibling who died.

Because this is such a complex question and depends on the order of death, whether the children are legitimate (or paternity was established if they are not) and whether anyone had a will, your best bet is to sit down with a probate attorney who practices in the county/state where your mother lived at the time of her death to definitively nail down who gets what.