Wootton/Watson Heir Hunters

Today, our heir hunters cross the water and travel to foreign shores.

So this is what I've got so far.

This is from the information that we've been given.

The first case is riddled with unanswered questions.

Has anything in your searches so far indicated the name Shearer?

-I didn't find one.

-OK.

And the second sees a transatlantic race to trace heirs.

Suddenly, this had become an international competition

that had moved from the west coast of the United States

to the north-west coast of England.

It's all about getting to the root of the problem for the heir hunters.

We'll have to work on this and unravel the whole mystery behind it.

Sometimes, a case comes in that takes an heir hunt overseas

in search of crucial records that can only be discovered in person.

Today, Daniel Curran, MD of London-based heir-hunting firm Finders

has travelled to Guernsey on the trail of the case

of retired clerk Joan Mary Wootton.

Joan was born on the Channel island on the 18th of February, 1927,

and died aged 88 of lung disease in the spring of 2015 in Norfolk.

She was a really nice lady, very quiet and she liked company

and she liked to chat and we always used to stop and speak to her.

Leaving no will

and featuring a few weeks previously on the Government's Bona Vacantia,

or unclaimed estate list,

Daniel has limited information regarding Joan's life.

Our first stop is really to try and identify her birth record.

The records for Guernsey are not online,

they're only held locally in Guernsey, so we have to get in touch

with our researcher here and then try and work on the family tree from there.

Research is still done the old-fashioned way on the island,

which means thumbing through birth, marriage, and death records.

Daniel's on his way to meet Susan Illey,

a local researcher, who's working on Joan's case for him.

It's not going to be an easy one to crack.

In London, senior case manager Ryan Gregory has also been

looking into the case.

Can you help me with the... Just one stem.

So I've got the advert from the Bona Vacantia list

from the day that we opened the case.

Now, there was quite a bit more information there

than there usually is in a lot of the cases they advertise.

She was a widow, so obviously we knew we were looking for

a different surname other than Wootton

for any records going further back.

Ryan hoped that Joan's maiden name might provide clues

to her life story and lead to her heirs.

On the advert we were told that the deceased's maiden name was Le Tissier-Shearer.

Now, when that sort of information comes in to us in the office,

we're wondering, is this an hyphenated surname?

Where has the actual surname come from?

With the heir hunters' search covering so much ground,

it makes sense to kick things off on the island where Joan was born

to learn about her early life.

Daniel's arrived at the Greffe, the central records office

at the Royal Court of Guernsey, to meet researcher Susan.

Located here since the early 1800s,

the Greffe is home to all the island's birth, marriage and death records

and Susan has found Joan's birth record.

-So we know she was born in 1927 and here we have her, Joan M...

-Ah, OK.

..Le Tissier. Which is a good Guernsey name.

Born on February the 13th, so now we need to look in the register.

-18.

-Number 18.

-So now we can see her parents were

Walter Le Tissier and Florence Lydia Quentin

and they lived at the north side, in the Vale

and her father's occupation was coal heaver.

With Joan's parents' names,

the next step is to find details about their marriage.

-We'll look for a marriage in the indexes, prior to 1927...

-OK.

..when Joan was born.

-Careful as you go.

-A rickety, rickety spiral staircase.

-So, what do we have here?

-This is the Marriage Index...

-Right.

..from 1919, when registration, civil registration began.

This manual searching is like a treasure hunt.

One clue leads to another, and having found Walter and Florence's

marriage listing, Susan can quickly find their marriage certificate.

This will be the key to unlocking her past

and to starting her family tree in the hope of finding her heirs.

So we can see they got married on Boxing Day in 1925

-in the parish church at St Sampson.

-Right.

Water was 32 and Lydia 24.

With confirmation that Le Tissier was Joan Wootton's maiden name,

there's still the question of the other name she had listed, Shearer.

So, has anything in your search so far indicated the name Shearer?

I did look for a marriage for Joan, but I didn't find one.

The trail leading to answers about Joan Wootton's former name

may have come to a dead end,

but with Walter and Florence's marriage certificate found,

Ryan had more fuel to fire his search in the London office.

Using the names of the parents that our agent was able to provide us,

we could then go back and look at the census records for Guernsey.

That is one of the few sections of information

we have available to us in the office.

So we were able to identify the fact that Joan's father,

Walter Le Tissier, was one of four children

and Joan's mother was actually one of five.

So we were researching as much as we could

with the information on the 1911 census

for both the maternal and paternal families,

when Susan in Guernsey managed to get

some very important information over to us.

Susan had news which would lead them

one step closer to tracing Joan's heirs.

-I've found three siblings, all girls.

-Mm-hm.

-Sisters of Joan.

Here we are.

-So, Doreen May, born on the 25th of September...

-OK.

-..in 1932.

-Same parents.

-Yep.

Daniel and Susan found Joan's second sister

in another record book upstairs.

Ruby Rose, she was born on May the 6th, 1936.

There was one further child, she was born in 1941, Valerie. Valerie M.

So Walter and Florence Le Tissier had four daughters

over a 14-year period.

Joan Mary was the eldest,

followed by Doreen May,

Ruby Rose and Valerie Maud.

With three siblings discovered, this could mean potential heirs

and Susan has homed in on one of them.

Well, I picked up on Ruby because Roselle is her married name.

It's quite a Guernsey name

and I do know several people with that surname.

So I spoke to one of my colleagues, who actually knew her.

-She was his auntie.

-Oh!

And he told me that she'd died in the UK, in hospital,

and he was able to share with me her children's names,

so that then allows you to do the contact.

-And they would be heirs to this...

-Potential beneficiaries, yes.

-OK.

But there's still a vital question unanswered.

Why was Joan Wootton, whose maiden name was Le Tissier,

also known as Joan Le Tissier Shearer?

We still had a massive question mark over the surname Shearer.

If this was due to an adoption or a form of marriage,

we could be looking at completely the wrong family,

or there may have even been children from another marriage

that we weren't picking up on. So, optimistic, but very wary.

Joan's name certainly became a sticking point in her case.

But as time moved on, new evidence did come to light.

It transpired that Joan had to tragically flee her home,

and her family.

As World War II engulfed Europe, German forces occupying France

set their sights on the Channel Islands.

And in 1940,

Joan's family made a life-changing decision for their eldest daughter.

Joan was just 13 years old.

We understand that Joan was actually evacuated from Guernsey

on the eve of the Nazi invasion of World War II.

In June 1940, a year into World War II,

the Channel Islands became the only British territories

to be occupied by the Germans.

Almost half of Guernsey's population of 40,000

were evacuated to England, Scotland and Wales.

They were mainly young children, some mothers and teachers.

Molly Bihet was one of the few to stay on her island home.

When the Germans came in 1940, I was almost nine.

I remember that very, very well, of course.

At the evacuation time, I can remember my mother being

so worried sick. We were crushed

with so many people wanting to get away.

It was a really horrid time.

Some children stayed here, young children stayed with their parents.

We were farming, so we stayed as children here,

here in the occupation.

But it wasn't an easy decision when the schools were going

and urging their children to go.

Not long after the last boat taking evacuees

to the safety of the mainland set sail, the island was bombed.

The Germans wrongly believed lorries laden with Guernsey tomatoes

ready for export were military vehicles,

and dropped their bombs, which killed 33 islanders

and injured 67 more.

It was on Sunday, June 30, two days later,

that the Germans arrived here at the airport by plane.

For the next five years, everything changed for the islanders.

Most of their children were gone, including young Joan Wootton,

and they were living side-by-side with German soldiers

under fear, rations and curfews.

The end of the war finally came in 1945.

It was a jubilant day for the islanders.

Since six o'clock in the morning, we could see these boats

in front of Herm, just by the harbour.

So my mother, my sister and I, we dashed off

and we ran as fast as we could.

And we got down to these 22 soldiers, marching,

bayonets, tin hats.

All smart, new rifles, and we just loved them, kissed them,

cried with them.

We just had to just love them and cuddle them,

and they were crying with us.

Soon after the war, the evacuees began returning to Guernsey,

and the Queen and King visited the island.

But there are no records of Joan coming home.

And if she ever did, she didn't stay.

And by the time the war finished in 1945, she was then 18

and she would have perhaps have adopted parents,

where she was evacuated to, who looked after her,

and she probably took a job and went on from there.

So, Joan's life continued away from her family in Guernsey,

and it was perhaps the family who took her in as a 13-year-old evacuee

who would provide the answer to the puzzle of her surname, Shearer.

And in the office in London, Ryan received a document

which seemed to confirm this.

One of the few certificates we were actually able

to order from the office, being an English record,

was actually Joan's marriage to Roland Leonard Wootton.

Now, as soon as this came into the office, we were actually able to see

that Joan had listed her father as Francis Linden Shearer.

Now, this really went a long way to solving the riddle of where

the Shearer name came from.

With this confirmation in place, Daniel is on his way to meet

Joan Wootton's niece, Kay Leslie,

daughter of her sister, Ruby Rose.

Kay was born in 1960...

-Hi.

-Hello, Kay.

..20 years after her aunt, Joan, fled her home of Guernsey.

-So, your mother was a Le Tissier at birth?

-Yes.

-OK.

I can remember my grandparents vaguely, her parents.

And if we can... We work, we have an online system...

Kay may have distant memories of her grandparents,

her Aunt Joan's parents, and although she wasn't born

when Guernsey was under German occupation,

she does have a knowledge of those turbulent years.

As a writer, she's covered those bleak times.

Those five years, for children who went away

as slightly older children, it changed their lives,

because they came back.

Either they didn't come back, or they came back and some of them

didn't even recognise their family after five years.

You know, growing up without any contact at all.

And I always thought that was really poignant.

-And, of course, the big shock was I'd written those pieces...

-Mm.

..completely unaware that I had an aunt who went through exactly that.

-Exactly the same thing.

-I wouldn't judge Joan at all.

She didn't have that tie with Guernsey, through her childhood.

The family had been through really hard times for those five years and,

-hopefully, she had found something that was comfortable and secure.

-Mm.

And to think that somebody who was such a close relative

had survived for a long period and had died only recently

and we didn't know about her.

This might be nice for you, actually, we've got some photographs.

This is from friends of Joan.

And, apparently, this is the lady herself, this is your Auntie Joan,

-as a young lady.

-That's making me go a bit shivery, actually.

Because it suddenly becomes very real, doesn't it?

Oh, she looks like Doreen, my mother's older sister.

-She looks really like her.

-Definitely one of the family, then?

-Yeah, very much so. Yeah, I can definitely see that.

-Yeah.

It's fantastic to be able to put a face to the name.

My personal reaction to hearing that there was an aunt,

who I'd never known, was a sadness.

To think that, until fairly recently,

there was a direct relative, a close relative,

who I didn't know anything about and who was living in the UK,

made me feel sad and curious, actually, at the same time,

because I thought, "Why does this woman not want to have

"any contact with her family in Guernsey?"

But, you know, life is complicated sometimes.

This case has been, certainly,

one of the more pleasant ones to deal with.

It's a nice story of a family being reunited, at least in name,

with the person they never knew about.

Daniel's firm signed up all seven heirs to Joan Wootton's estate,

which is estimated at around £150,000.

Joan may be sadly gone, but she's definitely not forgotten.

All the neighbours all think of her very fondly.

She's got loads of friends in the village

that, you know, will miss her greatly.

To think that, for 30-odd years, there was someone

living across the English Channel who was such a close relative,

we all felt sad that the contact hadn't been made.

One month later, Joan Wootton's story takes another twist.

We were notified by our firm's solicitors in Norfolk

that they held a will.

If the will is valid, then she's left £180,000

to be divided between the RNLI and the local youth centre.

So, it does seem as though the heirs that we contacted

won't actually stand to benefit, after all.

Although Jane Wootton's relatives

may no longer be entitled to her estate,

they have been given the gift

of a missing piece of their family history.

The case of Susan Watson is

a particularly sad and interesting one.

Susan was raised in the quiet village of Leasowe

on the northern coast of the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire.

After graduating from Edinburgh University in 1973

with a first-class honours degree in biological sciences,

Susan emigrated 5,000 miles away

to Oakland in California,

where she worked as a biological scientist.

She had a real sense of fun and adventure,

was an intrepid traveller and a keen cyclist.

Tragedy struck when Susan was cycling home from the office

just before Christmas 2013.

She was knocked off her bike and killed by a truck.

Susan was just 62 years old.

The dreadful accident was covered by a local news station.

Susan was doing everything right.

She was obeying all the laws,

she was riding her bike with her helmet,

she probably had 14 lights on her bike,

because she was an amazing person

and lived brightly.

A memorial bike and ferry ride was held in Susan's honour

by her friends in the Oakland cycling community,

but since she was British,

her case came back across the pond

and was taken up by Saul Marks,

case manager at heir-hunting firm Celtic Research.

This case came to us from an associate company

who we work with in the United States.

They referred it to us in the hope that we could find heirs

here in the UK.

The American firm had told us that Susan seemed to be an only child,

she didn't have any children of her own,

and they found her parents and grandparents on the maternal side.

She had been living with a man in the United States

but they didn't appear to be married

and, as such, he didn't appear to have a claim to her estate.

So, it was up to us to go and find cousins who were living in the UK

or elsewhere who would be the rightful heirs.

We couldn't find a birth listing for the deceased

and when we've got information to suggest who the parents are

but there's no birth listing,

it usually suggests that the person is adopted

and we did a search of the adoption register

and, sure enough, there she was,

and we obtained a copy of the adoption certificate

and it proved that she was the adopted daughter

of Isabel Davie and George William Watson.

Although Saul discovered that Susan had been adopted,

the news didn't change the heir-hunter's job

when searching for her beneficiaries.

Records revealed that Susan's father George passed away

in 1966, when Susan was in her mid-teens,

leaving her mother Isabel to raise her on her own.

Isabel never remarried

and passed away in 1998.

So, with no siblings or children for Susan,

Saul knew he had to search for aunts, uncles and cousins,

all potentially her heirs.

The next step for me was to go to Liverpool Register Office

and get a copy of the marriage certificate of Susan's parents.

This gave us their ages at marriage,

which allowed us to find them both in the 1911 Census.

The census is invaluable for genealogists,

as it records each person living in a UK household,

including their ages, jobs and relationships to one another.

The 1911 Census showed us that Isabel had an older brother

named Gordon Davie, who was Susan's adoptive uncle.

So, if he had any children,

they would be heirs to the estate.

Sure enough, he had two children, they were both alive,

so we were really happy that things were starting nicely.

Things may have been off to a good start for the first two heirs traced

but, unfortunately, they weren't in the bag for Saul.

It transpired that Gordon's two children,

who were Susan's first cousins,

had actually been approached by a rival firm of ours here in the UK,

which meant that our American associates

had obviously got rivals there who had referred it to our rivals here,

so, suddenly, this had become an international competition

that had moved from the west coast of the United States

to the north-west coast of England.

Susan's two cousins were the only heirs on her mother's side of

the family, so the race was now on for Saul to track down

and secure any heirs on her father's side

before his competitors got there first.

In order to start our work on the paternal side of Susan's family,

we went back to her parents' marriage certificate.

We were able then to use the 1911 Census to establish that

George William Watson actually had two younger sisters,

and the parents of those people were Jane Watson and George Watson,

a stonemason.

Records also showed that Susan's great-great-grandfather,

John Watson, was also a stonemason,

and further research into census records between 1841 and 1871

uncovered that her father's two brothers

were also in the trade.

In the 19th century, stonemasonry often ran in families.

Stonemasons at that time would have been probably working as families,

like father and son would more than likely work together,

possibly even grandfather, father and son

could have been a combination.

The Watson family would have done jobs such as

work on buildings, works on churches, memorials...

A master stonemason would have also done carving work as well,

and would have been very well respected in his time.

The craft was a very skilled one

and would have taken many years to master.

He would have left school as early as 14

and gone straight into the family business

and you would do the very menial jobs,

then they'd let you on the tools to do very basic sort of jobs

to do with masonry, and over the years,

you'd get more familiar and your skills would develop over time.

So the Watsons appeared to be a close-knit

and hard-working family, and the next step for Saul

was to work his way up Susan's father's family tree.

A search of the marriage register showed that John Watson's

son George, Susan's grandfather,

married Jane Parsons in Chester in 1898.

They had three children - Susan's father, George William,

and his sisters Olive Jean and Queenie Elizabeth,

all born in Peckforton in Cheshire.

If Susan's aunts had had children,

this would potentially lead Saul to her heirs.

The first line we looked at was that of Olive Jean Watson.

She married Arthur Green in 1922 in Nantwich,

and they went on to have six children.

She had her first child when she just 20,

and she had her last child when she was very nearly 42.

We then delved into the family of Olive Watson and Arthur Green

in the hope that we might be able to find some heirs on this branch.

Their eldest child was also named Olive, but she was known as Betty,

and she had three children, who we visited,

and they signed with us.

The next child of the Green family was George, and he was known as Ike,

and he had quite a number of children, from whom

there were seven heirs, who, again, we were able to visit

and write to, and we signed. Having had a bad start to this case,

where the first two heirs who we spoke to had actually been

contacted by a rival firm,

it was a great relief for us to actually find heirs who

hadn't been contacted by the competition yet

and who were very willing to sign with us.

One of her first cousins once removed is Angela Lang.

Her mother was Susan's first cousin, Molly,

and her grandmother was Susan's aunt, Olive Jean.

She received a phone call from Saul with the news that she was

an heir to Susan Watson's estate.

It was a complete surprise, because I didn't know of her existence...

..prior to the phone call.

But Angela was glad to be given the chance to reconnect with her past.

This is a connection that's been lost, as far as my side

and Molly Green, my mother,

because my father moved us away from the Cheshire area.

It is a very strange feeling to inherit from somebody

whom I actually had no knowledge of before Saul contact me.

It's a shame that she didn't have family of her own to leave it to,

but, from my point of view, it's a very nice present to enable

an extra holiday or something of that nature.

Angela has come to Peckforton Castle,

where her great-great-grandfather, the stonemason John Watson,

helped carve and create this magnificent

architectural masterpiece.

It was commissioned by Lord John Tollemache, a landowner

and Member of Parliament.

So he purchased this estate in 1840,

and in 1842, he set about building this castle.

All the stone as we see now, which your ancestor would have had

a hand in creating, was all bought from the local quarry.

The architect Anthony Salvin, who designed the castle,

had a rather impressive CV.

He'd previously worked on both the Tower of London and Windsor Castle.

Would you like to take a look inside the castle, and I can

show you some of the rooms that your ancestor had a hand in building?

-That would be lovely, thank you.

-Great.

The castle, built from red sandstone,

took nine years to complete. It's Grade I listed.

-So, welcome to the Great Hall.

-Right.

This is my favourite room in the whole of Peckforton Castle.

-Right.

-And if you look around, you will see that it is exactly

-what a medieval great hall should look like.

-A baronial hall.

-Yeah.

-It's a very impressive room in a very impressive building,

I must admit.

Susan Watson, who's made this possible, this trip,

this visit, for me, because I'm one of her distant relatives.

It's very sad that perhaps she's never been back here and,

maybe, I kind of wish she could have.

Once all the heirs on the estate were found, we could send all

the relevant paperwork to our attorney in California,

who could submit a claim to the relevant court.

This was all going perfectly well, until he was made aware that

Susan's partner was actually also making a claim against the estate.

It turns out that Susan

and her partner had been living together as common-law man and wife.

What this meant, in this instance, was that Susan's partner did

actually have a reasonably legitimate claim to this estate.

US law was on Susan's partner's side and he WAS a rightful heir.

So, with an approximate value of around £500,000,

there were now 27 heirs who would inherit the estate between them.

And for Angela,

not only was she going to inherit a piece of her cousin's fortune,

she'd also been given an invaluable insight into her family's ancestry.

The death of Susan, intestate, without family, is very sad.

It is bittersweet.