Richard W. Kellow, who succeeded Harry F. Miller as Edison's personal business secretary, was head of Thomas A. Edison, Personal, a unit of the Secretarial Service Dept. of Thomas A. Edison, Inc, from 1916 until 1921. The documents in the Kellow File cover the years 1875-1929, but most are from the first three decades of the twentieth century. The file contains agreements and contracts, assignments and licenses, deeds, leases, mortgages, options, tax returns, powers of attorney, and miscellaneous correspondence. Some of the documents have been transferred into the Kellow File from the Harry F. Miller File.
The Kellow File consists of 239 envelopes, each containing several documents. The envelopes were numbered 1 through 259, but some envelopes were missing from the sequence. The envelopes were not arranged in chronological or topical order. However, the contents of each envelope were usually limited to a single document type, person, business interest, business relationship, or transaction.
All pre-1879 material has been selected. These nine items include documents pertaining to Edison's Menlo Park properties and agreements concerning the sale of foreign phonograph and telephone patents. The selected documents have been re-arranged in chronological order.
Similar documents of a legal or quasi-legal nature can be found in the Document File and in other series. Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park.