Many other forms of documentation that might capture the achievements of marginalized people are incomplete, biased, or simply absent.

Court records, newspaper archives, business records, academic archives: each of these has a history of selectively preserving some stories and neglecting others, in ways that typically favor the powerful and privileged.

The patent record is not perfectly neutral — the barriers to patent access that Black inventors and women inventors faced mean that the patent record understates their total inventive achievement — but within its scope it is remarkably reliable.

Mary Kenner held five patents, and those patents are there in the record for anyone to find.