You can't spare your family the grief of losing you. A revocable living trust spares a Chapel Hill family the drive to Lewisburg for probate afterward.

Marshall County has no separate probate court: its Chancery Court has exclusive jurisdiction over probate of estates and conservatorships, and the Clerk and Master in Lewisburg issues letters testamentary and of administration and reviews the accounts. A Chapel Hill family's house, then, passes through a courtroom on the Lewisburg square unless a plan keeps it out.

Chapel Hill is 1,700 people inside the town limits and growing at the edges, and the estates come in two kinds. In the old town on Depot and Maple, a house can sit on a plat drawn more than a century ago, and the town has already granted a variance where an old deed and a new survey drew different lines. A trust that describes that lot from the old deed holds the wrong land; we draw the deed into the trust from a current survey. At the edges, The Groves, Ellington and Spring Creek Farms are new subdivisions where plats were still being approved, deferred and reconsidered through 2026, and a house on an unrecorded plat is a promise the trust cannot hold until the plat records. Past the town, toward Henry Horton State Park and the Duck River, the estate is land and a farm, and what a trust decides there is who gets it and whether the heirs can agree to sell.

Vanderpool Law is in Franklin, about forty-five minutes by I-65 and Highway 99 to Seaboard Lane, and the first conversation is thirty minutes, by phone or in person, at no charge. Bring the deed and any survey; in Chapel Hill the survey is the document that matters. You leave with a plain-English summary and a fee in writing, before you decide. The deed into the trust records with the Marshall County Register at the courthouse annex in Lewisburg, where we record our Marshall closings. If the price is the thing standing in the way, say so: for a family going through a rough time, in certain situations, there is a trust scholarship.