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Derek K. Hopkins
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Friends of Derek Hopkins
Address: 3036 Whiteford Rd
Pylesville, MD 21132-
Phone: (443) 528-7058
Email: derekh3036@gmail.com
Website: www.derekhopkins.org
Derek K. Hopkins: The Neighbor Who Already Knows How to Do the Job
The Register of Wills is not a campaign slogan office. It is the office families walk into after a funeral, when the paperwork is still a fog and someone has to make sure a will is honored, an estate is opened, and the people left behind are not taken advantage of.
Derek K. Hopkins has been that person in Harford County since December 1, 2010.
He was sworn in the night of November 30, 2010. He has held the job through four terms. In the June 23, 2026 Republican primary he ran unopposed and received 19,994 votes. In November he faces Democrat Jo Wanda Strickland-Lucas. The question for voters is simple: keep the man who has already done the work, or hand a specialized courthouse office to someone who has not.
A Harford life, not a résumé stunt
Hopkins was born August 12, 1976, in Havre de Grace. He grew up on the Hopkins family farm in Darlington. He has said, more than once, that the work ethic came from his great-grandmother Hazel Hopkins and his grandfather Harry G. Hopkins. That farm is now in preservation. He is a fourth-generation Harford County farmer and still lives in Pylesville.
He is not related to the late Register Harry “Tombstone” Hopkins. The last name is common in this county. The record is his own.
North Harford High School. FFA. Maryland State FFA Vice President. Virginia Tech for business management, with time in the Swine Research Center. Then the trade that actually prepared him for estates: Missouri Auction School in Kansas City, and the three-year Certified Auctioneer Institute at Indiana University. Before the courthouse he was a full-time auctioneer, estate appraiser, and third-generation real estate agent with the Harry Hopkins Company, focused on estate work. That is not adjacent experience. That is the same pile of paper, the same family arguments, the same personal property and real estate that walk through Room 304 of the courthouse.
He joined the Darlington Volunteer Fire Company at sixteen. After he bought a house in Pylesville he joined Whiteford Volunteer Fire Company, where he has served as firefighter, EMS driver, and past president. After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA sent him to Mississippi for more than a month. He has been on Harford County’s Agricultural Advisory Board since 2009. He is a past 4-H member and still volunteers. In March 2026 the Harford Land Trust gave him its Volunteer Award, with a county proclamation to go with it.
He is also the founder of the Char Hope Foundation, a local nonprofit built around longer-term recovery from addiction — not a press release charity, a county one.
He has been married more than twenty years to Katrina, who spent years in Maryland’s court system. They have two children, Tim and Emma.
What the office actually does — and how he has run it
The Register of Wills administers probate. The office opens estates, receives inventories and accounts, collects inheritance tax for the State of Maryland, and works with the Orphans’ Court. Families who have never written a will walk in scared. Families who have a will still need someone who can explain the next form without talking down to them.
Hopkins’ pitch has been consistent for sixteen years: be in the office, treat people with compassion, run free outreach so citizens learn what a will is and what the office does, and use the law to hold personal representatives who steal or sit on an estate.
He has said Harford is one of only four of Maryland’s twenty-four jurisdictions whose Register office is self-sustaining on the RSTARS report that goes through the Treasurer. The office still sends tens of millions a year in inheritance tax to Annapolis. Fiscal discipline in a small courthouse shop is not glamorous. It is the difference between an office that lives off the work and an office that becomes another line item.
He has also been blunt about a uglier part of the job. Estate theft is real. He has worked with Harford County Sheriff’s detectives and the State’s Attorney’s Office on cases that produced convictions — including theft over $100,000. That is not a campaign talking point he invented in 2026. It is what the office is for when a personal representative decides the dead no longer have a voice.
Why vote for him
Because the job is technical, local, and unforgiving of on-the-job training.
Because he already knows the statutes, the forms, the funeral homes, the lawyers, the CPAs, and the families who come in raw.
Because he came to the office from the estate side of the private market — auctions, appraisals, real estate — instead of discovering probate after winning a primary.
Because he has kept the office in the black by Maryland’s own measure, while still running education programs so fewer families arrive with nothing in writing.
Because he has spent the same years on a fire truck, on an Ag board, on a recovery foundation, and on a farm that was here before the development maps got redrawn.
Because Register of Wills is one of the few countywide offices where “incumbent” is not a smear. It is evidence. Sixteen years is a long time to hide incompetence in a shop that size. Harford has not been asking him to hide.
Integrity. Professionalism. Commitment. That is the line on his own site. For once, the line matches the biography.
Keep Derek K. Hopkins as Harford County Register of Wills.
Jo Wanda Strickland-Lucas
Additional Information
Democratic
Committee Name: JoWanda Strickland Lucas for Register of Wills
Address: PO Box 142
Aberdeen, MD 21001-
Phone: (443) 504-3640
Email: jowanda.lucas@yahoo.com
Social: www.facebook.com/jo4row
Jo Wanda Strickland-Lucas: A Rematch With No Record for the Job
The Register of Wills is the office grieving families walk into when a will has to be proved, an estate has to be opened, an inventory has to be filed, and inheritance tax has to be collected for the State of Maryland. It is not a party honorific. It is a technical courthouse shop. Derek K. Hopkins has run that shop since December 1, 2010.
Jo Wanda Strickland-Lucas wants it anyway. She wanted it in 2022. Harford already answered.
Who she is
She lives in Aberdeen. Campaign filings list P.O. Box 142, Aberdeen, MD 21001. Phone (443) 504-3640. Email jowanda.lucas@yahoo.com. The committee name is JoWanda Strickland Lucas for Register of Wills. The Facebook page is jo4row. She filed for the 2026 Democratic nomination on February 24, 2026. She ran unopposed in her own primary, the same way she did in 2022.
Public write-ups put her in her late sixties, born around February 1956. She attended Howard University. That is the education line. There is no published law degree, no published probate certificate, no published years as a personal representative, estate attorney, appraiser, or deputy in a Register’s office. The civic line that does appear is a board seat at Inner County Outreach, a faith-based nonprofit in Aberdeen, and a title on the Harford County Democratic Central Committee — Vice Chair.
A Central Committee gavel is not a courthouse job. A nonprofit board is not an estate docket. Attending a university decades ago is not sixteen years of opening estates in Room 304.
She has never been elected to anything.
The 2022 verdict she wants you to forget
November 8, 2022, official Harford canvass: Derek K. Hopkins (R) — 64,518 votes — 64.59 percent. Jo Wanda Strickland Lucas (D) — 35,281 votes — 35.32 percent. Write-ins — 88.
That is not close. That is a county telling a first-time nominee that the Register’s office is not a participation trophy. She did not spend the next four years becoming a probate clerk, a deputy register, or an estate lawyer. She spent them as a party officer and then filed the same race again.
Unopposed in a Democratic primary is not a mandate. It is a vacant line. The League of Women Voters asked the 2026 candidates about experience, public service, and priorities. On those questions her file is the same as it was on the rest of the thin Democratic slate: no response, no response, no response.
The job she is asking for
Maryland’s Register of Wills receives wills, opens small and regular estates, takes inventories and accounts, works with the Orphans’ Court, and collects inheritance tax. Families arrive raw. Personal representatives steal. Forms have deadlines. A mistake costs heirs money and time they do not have.
Hopkins came to that work from the estate side of the private market — auctioneer, appraiser, third-generation estate real estate — then sixteen years inside the office. He has said Harford is one of only four Maryland jurisdictions whose Register shop is self-sustaining on the RSTARS report. He has worked theft cases with the Sheriff and the State’s Attorney. That is the job.
Strickland-Lucas is asking voters to hand the same office to a party vice chair with no published probate résumé. The question is not whether she is pleasant at a committee meeting. The question is whether she can sit across from a widow on a Monday morning and not learn the statute on the taxpayer’s clock.
The public record she would rather talk around
A Register of Wills is a fiduciary office in everything but name. The person who holds it tells other people how to handle other people’s money after a death.
Public federal dockets show Jo Wanda Strickland-Lucas as a debtor and a self-represented appellant in Maryland bankruptcy matters. Case 19-20100 produced a 2020 district-court appeal captioned Strickland-Lucas v. Citibank N.A./Nationstar Mortgage. Case 24-14778 produced 2024 appeals against Chapter 7 trustee Brian A. Tucci — including Strickland-Lucas v. Tucci in the U.S. District Court for Maryland (among them 1:24-cv-02209 and 1:24-cv-03421) and a further appeal docketed in the Fourth Circuit as No. 25-1064, Jowanda Strickland-Lucas v. Brian Tucci, with the debtor listed as her own counsel.
Those are public files, not gossip. They are mortgage and trustee fights she prosecuted herself. They are the opposite of the quiet competence a probate counter requires. A candidate who has spent years as a pro se debtor arguing with a bankruptcy trustee is not the person you want explaining fiduciary duty to a first-time personal representative.
Bankruptcy is legal. Appealing is legal. None of that is the same as being ready to run the office that polices estates.
Why you should not vote for her
Because she already lost this race by nearly thirty points and brought back the same thin file.
Because she has never held elected office and has never published the estate experience the job is built on.
Because her strongest local credential is a Democratic Central Committee title — the same committee that has spent 2026 filling ballots with placeholders.
Because she would not answer a basic voter-guide questionnaire about the office she wants.
Because the public docket that does exist is a debtor-and-trustee docket, not a probate-administration docket.
Because Register of Wills is one of the last countywide jobs where on-the-job training is an insult to the family at the counter.
Can she do the job?
No. Not on this record.
She can file. She can run unopposed in a primary nobody else wanted. She can put “Vice Chair” on a mailer. She cannot show Harford a single term, a single deputy year, or a single published estate practice that matches what Hopkins has already done for sixteen years.
If the test is party loyalty, she passes. If the test is whether a grieving family should trust her with a will, an inventory, and a tax return to Annapolis, she fails.
Keep the Register who already knows the work. Do not hand Room 304 to a rematch.
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