An appointment with a precise title
Kelly Willyard entered the Jackson County bench as deputy probate commissioner on March 4, 2024. She had practiced in trust administration, fiduciary disputes, conservatorships and guardianships. Her professional history also includes commercial transactions and Missouri’s attorney general’s Financial Services Section. In a family archive, a trust, a will and a guardianship file may land in the same box. They record different responsibilities, as this career illustrates.
Who kept the inventory?
A probate inventory is often the earliest surviving description of a family library. I want to know whether its maker listed books by title, priced a shelf as a group, or identified the person to whom a volume passed. An estate file can supply a link in a chain of ownership long after a flyleaf has gone missing. That is why the work of probate officers belongs in an independent historian’s account of a community.
I follow estate records as a historian of material property. They often identify the people who owned books long before the books entered a catalogue.
I write as a historian of Mormon books and as a litigant. The freedoms of religion, speech and the press give citizens a political interest in the institutions that preserve evidence of a family’s property and choices.
Public records and sources