In Williams v. Ward (1971) 15 Cal.App.3d 381, the testator died in 1930, leaving a life estate to his daughter and the remainder to her "children" upon her death. The life tenant adopted minor children of a second cousin in 1947 and in 1967, 37 years after her father's death, she adopted two adults who were apparently strangers to the family. The court held that those persons who were adopted as minors could take under decedent's will, while those adopted as adults could not. In Williams, the reviewing court noted that there were but few cases in other jurisdictions on the subject of the inclusion of adult adoptees in classes designated in a will and that these offered little guidance because of the "variations in the terms of the testaments and of the statutes." ( Williams v. Ward, supra, 15 Cal.App.3d 381, 387.) The court then turned to an analysis of Estate of Stanford (1957) 49 Cal.2d 120, in which our Supreme Court held that a woman legally adopted as an adult in New York in 1924 might take under a will executed in California in 1903. In Stanford, the adult and her two minor children were adopted in the same New York proceeding by a niece of the testatrix. The Ward court was of the opinion that Stanford never really focused on the issue of adult adoption since it was occupied with the broader problem of contingent and vested remainders and since appellant university had no reason to raise the issue. ( Williams v. Ward, supra, 15 Cal.App.3d 381, 387-388.) The court also stressed that Stanford involved a single adoption of "a mother and two daughters, all of whom were related to testatrix," rather than adults who were complete strangers to the testator. ( Williams v. Ward, supra, 15 Cal.App.3d 381, 388.) In Williams, the court lists a number of public policy reasons for excluding adult adoptees from testamentary dispositions executed before 1951.