The paper examines succession practices on eastern Finnish farms through an analysis of the use of wills and other documents of transfer. Wills are relatively rarely used, and the most important documents are contracts inter vivos between parents and children and between siblings. Such documents, with their detailed and precise conditions and provisions, may appear to mark the invasion of the family by the form and spirit of legal rationality and economic individualism. A deeper investigation of the contexts of their use, however, shows the situation to be more complex than this, and there is even a fictional element in some documents. Rural Finnish families organise succession to their farms within the framework of the law and state bureaucracy, but they do not play a merely passive role in their relations with such institutions.