{"id":972,"date":"2017-10-21T11:45:56","date_gmt":"2017-10-21T11:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teachingwiththemes.com\/?p=972"},"modified":"2025-09-13T10:05:53","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T10:05:53","slug":"estate-inventories-primary-sources-daily-life-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachingwiththemes.com\/index.php\/2017\/10\/21\/estate-inventories-primary-sources-daily-life-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Estate Inventories: Primary Sources for Daily Life in the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do historians recreate the daily lives of average people in the past? What primary sources exist to tell us how regular people worked, cooked, slept, or played?\u00a0 Historical estate or probate inventories provide many clues to answers these questions.<\/p>\n

Estate inventories are lists of the belongings of a person made after his or her death. These legal documents value the deceased person\u2019s estate for taxes, are used to divide the property among the heirs, or to sell the property to settle outstanding debts. This process is administered by a probate court. Since the Middle Ages, church or secular authorities in Europe and America appointed appraisers to make probate inventories. \u00a0Today, executors\u00a0 still compile a list of the deceased person\u2019 assets and distribute the assets to creditors or the heirs of the estate.<\/p>\n

These primary sources help historians recreate the daily lives of historical households. Standards of living, poverty and wealth, and social classes in a community can be studied. Historians also can see the transitions from a pre-industrial or frontier to an industrial or settled community using information from inventories. \u00a0Sometimes the appraisals listed items room-by-room. These detailed lists provide clues about the functions of various rooms, the items in those rooms, and the activities that took place in different areas of the house and its outbuildings.<\/p>\n

Estate inventories, wills, and other probate court records are public documents. Visit your local county court archives or ask your local historical society to determine the local of historical estate inventories and wills in your community. In Kentucky, these records are in the archives of the County Court Clerk.\u00a0In some cases, the earliest records may have been moved to a central state archive.\u00a0Many transcribed inventories are also available on the internet (see additional resources below).<\/p>\n

Choose inventories from several different historical eras to examine change over time. \u00a0Ask for photocopied or digital scans of the original documents.\u00a0 Students may struggle with the archaic handwriting and various spellings of common words. Encourage students to search the internet or the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 for the meaning of words like\u00a0piggin<\/a>, noggin<\/a>, hooks\/pothooks<\/a>, or single tree and clevy\/clevice\/clevis, (go to this site<\/a> and scroll to the bottom learn about trees and clevis). Reading estate inventories provides a glimpse into life in the past and the challenges faced by historians.<\/p>\n

\"Estate<\/a>
Estate Inventory, Kentucky, 1802<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a digitally scanned image of an appraisal, or estate inventory, recorded Kentucky in 1802. Moses Hiatt was probably born between 1775 and 1780, married in 1796, and died in his twenties in 1802. Hiatt lived in Garrard County, Kentucky, an area of the state first settled in the 1770s before the Revolutionary War. Kentucky became the fifteenth state in 1792, ten years before Hiatt\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Select the image for a larger, detailed view.<\/p>\n

The complete set of surviving appraisal documents for his estate includes a record of the sale of each item and the person who bought it. His widow, Isabella, purchased the most of the items listed in the appraisal. When compared to the appraisals of other estates in same area, the estate of Moses Hiatt was modest. But Moses Hiatt died in his twenties and likely would have accumulated more belongings over a lifetime. On the frontier, the challenges of long distance travel meant families of average means had few of manufactured items that were available and affordable in cities and ports.<\/p>\n

The Moses Hiatt estate inventory is one of the primary source documents featured in Investigating Family, Food, and Housing Themes in Social Studies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More primary sources for daily life:<\/h4>\n