No. A Georgia divorce does not revoke your will. It reads your former spouse out of it.
What the Statute Says
OCGA 53-4-49 provides that “[a]ll provisions of a will made prior to a testator’s final divorce or the annulment of the testator’s marriage in which no provision is made in contemplation of such event shall take effect as if the former spouse had predeceased the testator.” Honeycutt v. Honeycutt, 284 Ga. 42 (2008). Everything else in the will survives, and the gift to your ex-spouse passes as the will directs when a beneficiary dies first.
The same section adds two things. Georgia’s anti-lapse statute does not rescue the former spouse’s descendants who are not also yours, so a stepchild does not step into the gift. And if you remarry the same person without changing the will, the revoked provisions are revived.
This Was Not Always the Rule
Before the Revised Probate Code of 1998, a divorce wiped out the whole will. In Colella v. Coutu, 278 Ga. 440 (2004), children argued that their father’s 1994 divorce had revoked his 1980 will under the old statute and that he died intestate. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed, because “the law in effect at the time of the testator’s death governs,” and he died in 2000.
A Codicil After the Divorce Can Undo All of It
In Honeycutt, a man divorced in 1995 signed a codicil in 2003 adding $500 gifts to his children and stating that the rest of his will “shall remain in full force and effect.” That republished the 1988 will, which left his estate to his former wife. The Court held “the 1995 divorce had no effect on the testator’s act of naming Sarah as a legatee in the 2003 codicil.” She took the estate.
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