Probate documents often indicate that someone died “on or about” a certain date. That phrasing is intentional. Usually the precise date of death is not germane to the settling of the estate and if later it turns out the actual date was a day earlier or later, the documents in the probate file are not in error.
The important thing to the establishment of the probate process is that the deceased is actually deceased. 
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Sometimes one never had a date even close so this might give them. A closer timeframe.
[…] It says she died on or about 27th of July 1897, with “real property” of $15,700 dollars, with her son Samuel W. Packard as administrator of the estate, bond to a fidelity and deposit company in Maryland to guarantee his bond of $4,000 dollars. The phrasing that she died “on or about” is not, as Judy Russell has written about, on her blog, The Legal Genealogist, part of the fine print about other aspects, but is rather purposeful. Michael John Neill described this on a post on his blog, Genealogy Tip of the Day in late January of this year: […]