Francis/Gammon Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters are struggling with a case

which is proving a tough one to crack.

It looks as though this family's really very small

and dies out completely.

Deceased on birth certificate.

A second case has its roots in rock and roll.

He discovered the '80s pop sensation Katrina And The Waves.

It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters.

If I'm in Ely now, it always seems strange I can't ring him up,

say, "What are you up to? Are you coming for a beer?"

In the London offices of probate genealogists firm Finders,

case manager Ryan Gregory

and the team are starting work on a new case just in.

I was hoping to ask you a few questions

and then I can give you some information.

So this is the estate of Violet Francis.

The case has been referred to us privately,

and we're just going through the information that we have

in the initial contact e-mail from the person who referred it.

So far, we know that Violet Francis was born on the 10th November 1929

in London.

She passed away a spinster.

Her parents were William Francis and Violet Francis, nee Ware.

Violet Francis lived in Littlehampton, West Sussex.

She called the seaside town home for around nine years

after moving there from Staines in Middlesex.

Edna Smith lived on the same street as Violet

when she was still in Staines.

Violet was very much her own person.

Lived on her own. Never married, as far as I know.

I never saw her with anybody else.

Never saw her with friends or anything.

She just kept to herself.

And we'd meet perhaps on the way to the shops,

or on the way back from the shops.

And we both used to feed the horses in the field up the road.

Violet Francis died aged 85

on the 7th of October 2015

after suffering a stroke.

As far as we're aware, the estate comprises of a property which

may be somewhere between £300,000 and £400,000.

And then there's going to be some shares

and some bonds on top of that as well.

So we're talking a large amount.

All hands are on deck and Amy's also on the case.

I'm trying to look into the maternal family tree

just to see what we're looking at.

Size wise.

I found a 1911 census for the Ware family.

And it says that Violet's mother, Violet,

was one of just three children.

There was Violet herself and then a sister,

SFE, turned out to be Sarah Fanny Elizabeth Ware.

And a brother, John Henry.

Although the heir hunters have a head start on Violet Francis's case

with a few clues to get them started,

they can't rely on it all being fact.

Even though we've got quite a few bits and pieces here,

really we have to start from the beginning anyway

and verify all of it before we even get going.

As Violet's case is unfolding, Ryan makes a tragic discovery

when he receives her mother's death certificate.

Mother, Violet Francis, formerly Ware, deceased on birth certificate.

It turned out that Violet's mother,

she sadly passed away during childbirth.

So she died around the same time that Violet was born,

in November 1929.

That means that we only have a nine-year gap

to fill in terms of any siblings of Violet.

As the parents married in 1921, we've done a birth search

from 1921 to 1929 and haven't found any other issue to that marriage.

So it seems as though there is no brothers and sisters.

So we are looking at the maternal and the paternal families.

Confirmation has come in that Violet never married.

And because she had no siblings,

the next step is to find out who her grandparents were,

on both her mother and her father's side of the family.

Ryan hasn't been able to go that far back up Violet's family tree -

he's still stuck at her parents,

and has discovered some more details about William Francis.

I think I've found the deceased's father.

In 1911, it appears that he was already serving in the Royal Navy.

He was down in Portsmouth.

He was a cook's mate in 1911.

Violet's father, William Francis, was born in 1890.

He joined the Navy in 1907

at a crucial time for the beleaguered British Empire.

However, he wasn't on the front line -

and his naval career came from humble beginnings.

Essentially, throughout

his career in the Navy,

he was part of the cooking staff on the ships and bases

he served aboard.

He would have done various jobs within the ships or the bases'

galley, and it would have been everything from initial food

preparation, actually cooking things up, maintaining the big ovens.

William Francis would have alternated his service

between land and sea.

But in the years of conflict,

during the Great War, he was based on dry land.

He saw many changes over his 20-year naval career.

In terms of how his job has evolved...

As time progressed, it would have got slightly easier

because of improvements in technologies.

He even had a chance to serve in one of the Navy's first

aircraft carriers in the 1920s, HMS Argus.

So he would have seen the Navy evolving around him

from this coal-fired, big-gun weapon system

to one that became much more three-dimensional.

The records are painting

a clear picture of Violet Francis's father's past.

In the office, Ryan is still working on the family tree

but is struggling to branch out.

At this time, we don't know who the paternal grandparents were.

We know the paternal grandmother was called Elizabeth Francis.

But because she was widowed by 1901,

we don't know exactly what her husband's full name was.

I'm just going to try and see if I can do a marriage search

to see if anything pops up.

Then we can hopefully piece it together like that.

The team has just uncovered the identities of Violet's grandparents

on her mother's side of the family

from her mother's birth certificate.

They were Johan Richard Ware and Sarah Naomi Long.

Married in 1882,

they had three children,

including Violet's mother,

also called Violet.

Working on the other side of

Violet's family, Ryan has asked

researcher Suzanne to try to track

down siblings of her father, William.

William Francis...

He's the youngest paternal uncle.

-How is Charlie spelt?

-It's just Charles in 1911.

-OK.

Do you mind seeing if you can find a marriage and a death certificate?

Yeah.

Amy's next job is to look for any children of Violet's

maternal aunt and uncle.

It looks like only her uncle John married and had children.

There are two possible children which,

if correct, would mean that we've got two maternal cousins to look at.

There are both born in 1910,

so they've probably passed away some time ago.

On the other side of the desk,

Ryan's had a breakthrough

tracking down Violet's father's side of the family.

I've just managed to find the bit of information on the

1911 census that we were after.

It shows how many children there was in the paternal family.

Now we know that the paternal grandmother, Elizabeth,

was widowed by the time of the census.

But we just found out that she'd had five children,

four of whom were still living by 1911.

One of those was the deceased's father.

Researcher Suzanne is having

no luck finding living children of Violet's uncle Charles.

Suzanne's got Charles but...we think it probably has died out.

But as they're about to call it a day,

Ryan has some positive news.

So I think we may have just found a potential...

Well, we have found a potential beneficiary on the estate

of Violet Francis.

One of the dead ends in Suzanne's search for Violet's paternal

cousins has suddenly come to life.

I'm looking at the stem of Charles Francis.

He had two children in Staines.

One of them I found has passed away fairly recently.

2009. And he had three children himself.

So it looks like I've managed to find contact

details for two of them.

Now the team has reaped the rewards of their research

and finally located heirs to Violet's estate, it's over to

travelling researcher Phil,

who's in Staines, to tie up the loose ends.

We are seeing Andrew and David Francis.

They are both in their 50s.

I've got the paperwork to sign both up as beneficiaries,

or potential beneficiaries, to this lady's estate.

Violet Francis was born on the 10th November 1929.

You two are the paternal cousins...

once removed to Violet.

-Right.

-Your grandfather, Charles...

-Yep.

-..was the brother to Violet's father.

-Who was William.

-OK.

-Do you remember uncle William?

-Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

-Yeah? Mum, do you remember an uncle William?

-No.

-No?

We had no idea we had a great cousin,

a second cousin called Violet at all.

The first information we had was

when we had a call from the office on Monday or Tuesday this week.

-Thank you very much. Thanks for your time.

-Lovely to meet you.

Lovely to meet you.

A further five heirs were discovered

on Violet's father's side of the family.

And a few days later, another heir has surfaced on Violet's

mother's side of the family,

bringing the total number of heirs to nine.

In a case that's certainly taken a long time to bear fruit,

there's one final twist.

We were actually notified that the deceased had left a will.

The first thing we want to do is notify the family members that we've

contacted that they may no longer be entitled to inherit from the estate.

So that's what we did.

Almost as soon as we told everyone that they may not be entitled

to inherit from the estate,

we got a call from the executors of the deceased's will.

They were able to confirm to us that actually two of the residuary

heirs in the deceased's will had predeceased Violet.

That meant again that the heirs

that we'd initially contacted would be

entitled to inherit from Violet's estate after all.

-Newmarket.

-Oh.

-What do you think?

-I like that.

John Gammon, from Ely, in Cambridgeshire.

He made a name for himself in the music industry in the 1980s

as a hugely successful journalist and band manager,

in a career spanning four decades.

John's friends have fond memories of the early days.

I met John when I was a teenager.

About 17.

John worked, at that time, at the local hotel.

And we met at a coffee-bar-cum... the sort of thing

we had in those days, jukeboxes, pinball machines.

That's how I first met John.

And we hit it off...from the word go, really.

In August 2015, John sadly passed away after battling

a serious illness. He was 63 years old.

John became a very close friend

over the last 20 years.

I got to know him first of all when I was a corporate manager

at Lloyds Bank. John was a client.

He had his loves in his life,

he had his Tottenham Hotspur, that he loved.

John was passionate about his music

and about writing and reading, but most of all he loved his music.

Our friendship just developed from that,

because he was unlike most customers that you have as a bank manager.

Although John was much-loved, because he died leaving no will,

his case was taken up by London-based heir-hunting firm

Fraser & Fraser.

The way we source our work has changed

dramatically over the years.

And now we rely a lot more on the internet.

What caught my eye was the fact that John, during his lifetime,

appeared to have been a successful music journalist.

And had also been a manager of several successful bands.

Pull that open and have a look at these different ones.

He discovered the '80s pop sensation Katrina And The Waves

and ran a promotions company called Ham Acts during the same period.

Katrina And The Waves. They were...

Eurovision Song Contest winners, weren't they?

I don't know. It's before my time, I think.

-Yeah. 1997.

-THEY LAUGH

Before your time. Yeah, it was before mine as well(!)

There's lots of tributes about Mr Gammon.

"I shall miss his blunt sense of humour

"and his general love/hatred of the live industry."

"Just the worst news. John was an absolute one-off.

"And the wittiest and most entertaining of company."

John's entry into the world of journalism

set him off on his path to following his dream.

John had a number of career highlights.

The first of which was he was extremely proud the first time

he got his name on a record sleeve.

John was very content in his life.

Yeah, he was doing what he loved doing,

which was working from home, writing.

He had his circle of friends that he would meet up quite regularly,

chat and put the world to rights with.

And the world that John was living and working in at that time

was a thrilling one.

I think the '80s was THE most exciting time for pop music

and pop culture, particularly in Britain.

You had to this incredibly rapid turnover of scenes and styles

and tribes. You had, you know, the 2-Tone Rude Boy movement,

you had Goths and New Romantics.

John Gammon's love of music came at an exciting time.

He started off working as a manager for live bands.

John Gammon was a live agent at a time

when a live agent was a pretty important thing to be.

The received wisdom with the music industry is

that 20 or 30 years ago, you went on tour to sell your record.

Whereas now, you put a record out to sell your tour.

MUSIC: Walking On Sunshine by Katrina And The Waves

And as John was pounding the streets

looking for bands that caught his eye,

one rock group with its American front woman stood out to him.

John would have discovered Katrina And The Waves in Cambridge,

playing a local gig, because they were a local band.

A band like Katrina And The Waves would have probably just been

doing the thankless thing of slogging around the local

live circuit, just hoping that someone like John might happen

to be in the room with his notebook and might happen to see them.

And John's hunch about Katrina And The Waves paid off.

I think probably the highlight of John's early career would have been

seeing Katrina And The Waves having a huge international hit record.

And that happened with Walking On Sunshine.

Which...it got to the top ten in the States and the UK.

And this is a time when record sales were at quite a peak,

so a number one record would be selling millions.

But even a record at number eight or nine would still sell

hundreds of thousands. That would have been so satisfying,

to see a band that you've really invested so much of your

heart and soul into finally making it big.

# Don't it feel good? #

In the '90s, Katrina And The Waves went on to win

the Eurovision Song Contest - the last British act to do so.

In the same decade, John concentrated on his writing

but didn't let go of the music.

So, in 1995, John became an investigative journalist

working in the music industry's trade publications.

And his job, I suppose, would have been to explain the music industry

back to people working in it, to let them know what was going on.

To give them all the kind of inside scoops on certainly what was

happening in the live music side of things.

John Gammon didn't only make a successful career

from his love of music, he also gained respect from his peers.

John's reputation is one of an absolute gentleman.

And that's actually quite difficult to maintain in an industry

with so much backstabbing, gossip and resentment going on.

So the fact that he managed to last for so many years in the industry

without making enemies and maintaining a lot of friendships

speaks well of him.

Hoping to be able to pass on an estate of some value to John's

next of kin, David's team members

began looking at the birth and death records.

Do we know where mamma and pappa were born?

Coupled with the information we received from speaking with

some of John's neighbours and friends, we were quickly able

to establish that John remained a bachelor throughout his lifetime.

And he was an only child.

The nearest next of kin to John would be aunts and uncles

or cousins on both his mother and father's family.

John's birth certificate would be the starting point

to unlocking the clues to his family tree.

First, it confirmed his parents were Lizzie Eden and John William Gammon.

They married on March 9th, 1940.

John William Gammon, he was 26 at the time of marriage.

He was a bachelor.

His occupation was that he was a builder's labourer.

Lizzie Eden, she was 24 at the time of marriage. She was a spinster.

At this time as well,

it was quite uncommon for women to have professions.

So that is unfortunately left empty.

John's parents' death certificates revealed some sad news.

Both parents, we discovered, died in the 1960s.

This is the death of John William Gammon.

He was 46 years old when he died. He was quite young.

And that was on the 23rd February 1960.

Just a year later, he was to lose his mother.

Born in 1951 himself,

this would have meant John Gammon was just a boy when he was orphaned.

It must be very tough for a child to go through. Especially at that age.

Research began with John's mother Lizzie's side of the family.

We were able to establish that Lizzie was born in 1915...

in Newmarket.

And it showed that her mother's maiden name was Sennitt.

Very unusual name.

So it didn't take very long for us to find

the marriage of Edward Eden to a Lydia Sennitt.

Literally a year before Lizzie was born.

From there, we then looked to see if Lizzie had other siblings,

i.e. aunts and uncles to the deceased.

Now they knew they had found John's grandparents on his mother's side,

his family tree was beginning to take shape.

Extensive research of the birth records of both England and Wales

uncovered just one aunt on John's mother's side.

Lizzie appeared to have just one sibling called Kate,

who was born in 1917, also in Newmarket.

There appears to be lots of marriages for Kate Eden.

All spread all over the country. But there is one in Cambridge.

We've got to work on the theory that the family...

She's born in Newmarket,

it's going to be the Cambridge marriage that is the right one.

So we are fairly confident that Kate married Leonard.

OK, so from this record that I can see right here,

apparently he was a military man.

Kate Eden and Frederick Thomas William Leonard were wed in 1939,

just months before the outbreak of World War II.

The war raged for six years,

in which time over 60 million lives were lost.

In 1945, towards the end of the conflict, as the British Army

and other Allied Forces moved into Germany, John's uncle

Frederick Leonard was thought to be part of the liberating forces

of one of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps.

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen happens right towards

the end of the war.

So we are looking at April 15th, 1945.

Frederick Leonard arrived at Bergen-Belsen as a member

of the military police.

But the camp wasn't always a death camp.

In 1935, it was actually a military training camp for the Wehrmacht,

the German Army.

Then World War II starts. It's a prisoner of war camp.

And then, towards the end of the war, 1944,

it becomes what's called recovery camp.

So again, it changes its nature.

And the idea of a recovery camp is, inmates in other camps that

were too ill or sick to work would be sent to Bergen-Belsen to recover.

But in actual fact, the title is ironic because very few of them did.

The camp had some notable inmates suffering within its confines,

including Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

What British troops were faced with when they arrived

they would never forget.

There were 60,000 people at Belsen when the British got there.

The camp was actually only designed for 10,000, so you can imagine

just the overcrowding that must have been there.

It's quite horrific.

Conditions in the camp were awful.

There were two things in particular the British had to contend with.

One was there was a massive outbreak of typhus in the camp.

So what the British did is they placed

a quarantine around the camp.

The other appalling loss

from death was just simply through starvation,

because these people arrived in the camp

and had just been left with no provisions.

Without actually being there, I can't imagine how horrible it was.

But it must've been absolutely horrific.

And I know many of the accounts of the British soldiers

when they first arrived,

they just struggled to come to terms with what was actually going on.

And there was this dawning realisation of just what

they had discovered.

While the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was unfolding, John's

uncle Frederick would have played an important role in proceedings.

The military police,

their key function is being a police for the military.

And their job was purely with the Army, rather than with civilians.

So the kinds of jobs that he may have been

doing around the camp would be guarding, patrolling,

checking in and out of the camp, that kind of thing.

After the camp was emptied of its abused inmates,

the British concentrated on holding the perpetrators

accountable for their actions.

I believe about 80 guards

and the commandant of the camp, Josef Kramer,

were arrested by the British

and the British then held a trial called the Bergen-Belsen trial

after the war.

Out of the 80 guards that there were, 20 actually died from typhus.

So the number was actually shrinking and a small number fled and escaped.

Kramer and the guards were convicted for their crimes.

11, including Kramer, were sentenced to death.

The team had John's uncle Frederick's war records

but now they needed to discover

if he and Kate had any children during the war years or soon after.

There's two births in Cambridge that look really spot-on

for the time that the parents get married.

We've got Carl Leonard and Anthony R Leonard.

John's first cousins, if living, would be his heirs.

Tony Leonard was discovered alive and well and in his 70s.

PIANO PLAYS

One day, out of the blue,

I had a call to tell me that John was deceased.

And I was quite shocked.

Well, it did come out of the blue,

because John, you see, didn't tell us

that he was even ill.

Or contact any of the family.

And none of us knew that he was ill.

You see, that was the kind of relationship it was.

Tony and John may have drifted apart in adulthood,

but in their early years, their lives were very much entwined.

John's parents passed away when he was about nine years old.

His father died, then two years later,

his mother died.

And he came to live with our family.

We were turfed out of our rooms,

we had two single beds in the same room, and he came in the bedroom.

But he didn't fit in too badly and we got on reasonably well.

You know, as a family. But we were both interested in literature.

And we discussed this quite a lot.

We had quite a good lot of discussions on that sort of thing.

After his troubled childhood,

the road wasn't always smooth for John.

As John got into his teens, he became rebellious

and there was a personality clash between him and my mother.

And this resulted in John eventually leaving.

And taking lodgings...

And he went to Cambridge and found some lodgings there.

As he spread his wings,

John's passion for music and writing began to make him a name

and earn him a living, but he and his cousins lost touch after that.

Tony had no news from John

until he received the call from the heir hunters.

In the heir hunters' office,

the team had also located an heir on his father's side of the family.

Bringing the total number of heirs to three.

The heir hunters were successful in quickly finding

John Gammon's beneficiaries.

However, they didn't go on to represent them in this case.

What we did establish from our point of view was that John

appeared to live a real rock and roll lifestyle

and spent all his money.

So the estate was fairly modest.

So, from our point of view, it was nice that we were able to locate

family that weren't already known so they could attend the funeral.

And John's friends made sure he had a fitting send-off.

I found out that he would have a council funeral.

Um...

I felt that he was too much of a good friend to actually let him

go that way. The band I was in at the time said,

"Well, we'll do a benefit gig for John at a local pub here in Ely."

We had a fantastic turnout.

It was just incredible.

The place was just packed.

Fantastic. You know, almost tearful, you might say.

To just think that people would do that for a friend.

I mean, it's hard to put into words, really.

It restores your faith in humanity.

-To John.

-The boy Gammon.

-It was a pleasure knowing you.

-Cheers, John.

-John.

-To John.

If I'm in Ely now, it all seems strange

I can't ring him up and say, "What are you up to?

"Are you coming for a beer?"

But, yeah, he'll always be remembered very fondly.