Any Attorneys in the Family?

We've discovered priests, doctors, soldiers, and many other professionals as well as our brave immigrant and laborer ancestors.

I'm quite sure that we have a few attorneys in our extended family, including one of my sons. But traveling back to the late 1800s, we see an early, if not the first, attorney in the family: Floyd R. Lilyard. 

Floyd is a more distant relative of mine, being the brother of Louise Lilyard who was the wife of Gus and Catherine Linn's youngest son, Charles Henry Linn. Charles, you may remember from an earlier post, died when struck by lightning while working in Kansas City, Missouri. He was just 46 years of age. He and Louise had two children, Wallace, who was the subject of an earlier post because of his stellar military record, and daughter Helen.

After Charles' death, Louise moved to Denver, Colorado where her brother Floyd Lilyard was a very successful attorney.

Floyd was the third of four children born to August Lilyard and his wife Ida Anderson. He was born in Dayton, Iowa, on 8 August 1875. As an adult, he moved to Des Moines where he earned his B.A. at Highland Park University in 1894. He then moved to Denver and, in 1898, earned his LL.B. degree.*

History of Highland Park University

In 1901, Floyd married Flora Frick, and in 1902, they had a daughter Lucille. 

Lilyard was named to the Colorado State Bar in 1898; he was a member of the Denver Bar Association; and a partner in the law firm Hilliard, Lilyard, and Finnicum. Interestingly, Benjamin Hilliard was also from Iowa and had practiced law in the state of Iowa before moving to Denver. 

Floyd's wife, Flora Frick Lilyard, died in 1948; Floyd Lilyard died in 1953. 

* LL.B. stands for "legum baccalaureus" which is a Latin designation for what was once almost universally the first professional law degree offered in the United States, the Bachelor of Law. It was first offered by Harvard in 1820, but by the early 1900's, the transition to today's J.D. or Juris Doctorate had begun.