Lineal Descendants: Definition and How It Works in California

By Eric Ridley, attorney, Ridley Law. Updated September 2026.

Lineal descendants are a person’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on down the direct line. California’s Probate Code calls this group issue, and many wills and trusts leave property to a person’s issue or descendants rather than naming each person individually.

How it works in California

Prob. Code, § 50 defines issue as “all his or her lineal descendants of all generations,” with the parent-child relationship at each generation determined by the code’s own definitions of child and parent. That last part matters, because those definitions decide whether a stepchild, an adopted child, or a child born outside marriage counts as a lineal descendant for a given document.

A will or trust that leaves property to a person’s “issue” or “descendants” is really asking two further questions: who counts as a descendant, which Prob. Code, § 50 answers, and how a gift gets divided among descendants of different generations, which the document’s chosen distribution method answers instead.

Why it matters

Getting the distribution method right matters as much as identifying who the descendants are. For example, a trust leaves the residue to the settlor’s “issue.” One child is alive, one child died leaving one child, and one child died leaving three children. Divided per stirpes, the only grandchild in the second branch takes a third and each grandchild in the third branch takes a ninth. Divided per capita at each generation, the four grandchildren share the remaining two-thirds equally. The definition of lineal descendants decides who is in the group, not how it is divided.

Common mistakes

Treating “lineal descendants,” “issue,” and “heirs” as interchangeable; an heir is determined by intestate succession law and can include people who are not descendants at all, such as a parent or sibling. Leaving property to “descendants” without specifying a distribution method, which can leave the outcome to a default rule the family never discussed. Forgetting that later-born or adopted children can also count as lineal descendants under the document’s own terms.

Related terms

• Per Stirpes: one method for dividing property among descendants of different generations.
• Per Capita: an alternative division method that treats descendants at the same generation more equally.
• Heir: a related but different category, defined by intestate succession rather than by descent.
• Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax: a federal tax that can apply when a gift skips a generation of lineal descendants.

Part of the California estate planning glossary.