My ex-wife father died in 1976 when she was a child. She's trying to find a copy of this will to determine if her siblings have deceived her.

Unfortunately, if your wife has contacted the appropriate court (the court that handled estates for the county where her father lived at the time of his death) and they do not have a copy of his Will, there may not be any Will to locate. Even though her father may have said he made plans, he may not have actually done so. That sort of thing happens all the time. Your wife may want to go back to the court and ask them if there is any probate file at all. If she's asking whether there is a copy of a Will on file, she may not be asking the right question. If her father didn't have a Will, there may have been an estate administration. However, depending on what assets he owned and how they passed at his death, it is also possible that there was no estate administration, and that there may not have needed to be one. If all of his assets other than nontitled tangible personal property and maybe a car passed under either rights of survivorship or beneficiary designations, there may not have been any assets in his probate estate that required an administration. Your wife is certainly free to hire an attorney to try to search further, but unfortunately, after 41 years, if there has never been any evidence of a Will or of any kind of provision for her benefit, it seems most likely that he may have meant to plan, but failed to do so. If that is the case, she will probably just be wasting more time and money hiring someone to try to help with the search. If her siblings really are hiding something, then a letter from an attorney might flush something out, but even if it did and it turned out that something was done incorrectly, the statute of limitations may have long since run. Best wishes to you and your wife, and my condolences to her on the loss of her father and the added distress she has suffered as a result of the whole situation.