Nor does my wife. Her half-brother would make a very good white supremacist, along with being a wife beating redneck and firmly believing that, as the firstborn male, he should have inherited everything. So she’s a little sensitive to anyone assuming superiority in any way.
Interesting that you should post that. Louisiana's law - unlike the other 49 states - is based on the Napoleonic Code and still has a lot of idiosyncrasies. Until fairly recently (and I'm going back several decades), the law stated that the first-born son inherited everything. Of course that was rarely enforced, but it did result in countless legal battles back in the day.
When my mother passed myself and my two sisters had a very civil and loving meeting and agreed between us that the estate would be divided equally three ways, irrespective of whatever the will said. When it was time to clean out her house, obviously the three of us wanted different things and there was no problem there, either. Each of us had different pieces of furniture or momentos that meant something to us. One thing I did want was my father's library. There were a
lot of books and while I didn't want all of them I figured the best thing to do was to take them all home and then sort them out.
We three just went through the house picking out what each of us wanted and there wasn't a single argument about anything.
The older sister was named executor of the estate (which was fine with me because I'm awful about any admin type work). That sister was kind of freaking out because we couldn't find Mom's jewelry, which was specifically mentioned in the will. My sister knew that I was something of a precious metals expert and she wanted me to help appraise the jewelry. With nothing to appraise I wasn't much help.
So anyway, we are going through the house with a fine tooth comb looking for the missing jewelry as we loaded up furniture and other personal items. I'd brought a large trailer to help with the process and it took a couple of days.
On the second day I was still loading books into the cargo area of my van. Due to time constraints I couldn't neatly stack everything, but was trying to load the books in at least semi-organized chaos. At one point I brought a load of books out and as I went to load them, the stack fell over. One large book fell open on the van's floor.
It was hollow and there was Mom's jewelry!
I brought it back into the house and gave it to my sister who was both dumbfounded and delighted!
Best
Doc