Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age

by Hendrik Hartog

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life’s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.

Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.

From one of the bedrocks of the human condition―the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young―emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2012

Reviews

[Cheryl Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent compendium of scholarly research about inheritance, and the development of the law surrounding the transfer and inheritance of assets. It presents a wide array of cases, and explains most clearly when (and not when) the burden of proof is made in satisfying the legal requirements for inheritance. Many a sad story is told of caregivers deprived of property they believed they would acquire in exchange for caring for family members (usually parents). The book is not an engaging read. It reads more like a textbook. But it is, in fact, a terrific reference book on a subject that has been woefully underrepresented on the bookshelves. This work is a backwards-looking book; it traces the evolution of the legal code through the decades. Its author doesn't make any significant effort on predicting the evolution of the law forward in time. Nonetheless, if the reader is looking for information on how the legal code addresses the contesting of wills (or division of assets in the absence of wills), when mixed with caregiving in particular, this is a great resource.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read half of it, got the gist, and stopped (it's hard to keep up the momentum through a scholarly work). The basic premise is really interesting - that in a pre-welfare state age, parents had to manipulate the tools of private law (their wills and contracts) to persuade children to take care of them - and really poses interesting, complicated issues about what family relationships do and should mean between adults. But I got tired of the slight differences between this and that old New Jersey farmer.

[Tracey]

Diane Rehm Show - 19 Jan 2012 - interview with author

[UChicagoLaw]

Recommended by Mary Anne Case.