Houlden/Pickwell Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters follow a case that suddenly goes cold.

It's as if this family had completely disappeared.

At that point, we had no idea why

we couldn't locate any further records.

Another team uncover a deeply buried family secret.

He grew up thinking his grandmother was his mother

and actually his mother was his sister.

It's a day of surprises for two families.

My dad didn't know anything.

His father, my grandfather, wouldn't tell him anything.

It's very strange to inherit from somebody I never knew.

Every year across the country,

thousands of people die without making a will

and with no known relatives.

Their houses can be left empty for some time.

One such case has been handed onto heir-hunting firm Fraser Fraser,

and partner Andrew Fraser is on his way

to the deceased's house in Broadstairs, Kent

to investigate the property.

This is a regular thing we do several times a month.

We all go out and look at properties that form part of the estates that

we're working with and we're instructed to deal with.

So, I'm looking today for any assets that may form part of this estate,

and of course, we're looking for - equally important -

to find liabilities and even a will.

However, it is very unusual for me to go to a property

that has sat empty for four years.

The house belonged to Joyce Hilda Houlden

who died in 2011, aged 87.

So, hopefully the keys will get us in

and we'll find lots of post.

Neighbour Anthony Collings has many memories of Joyce.

She kept herself looking well.

She dressed well. She was always smart.

She was just well presented.

I think she presented herself all the way through

until the last days, to be perfectly honest.

She was always immaculately turned out,

even when she was gardening.

Given that it's been four years since she died,

I think it's in particularly good order and very clean.

She was a strong woman, both physically and mentally.

She was a very proactive person.

She would be up first thing in the morning.

Especially when George passed away,

she was the one that was up on a ladder painting the drainpipes.

She always used to call me Andy, even though my wife used to say,

"His name is Anthony,"

and she used to do it just to get a reaction from me.

She just had that quirky personality,

which was always nice.

At the office in London, Gareth Langford is keen

to get all the family research done this afternoon.

We have to work this particular case as any other case, really.

We have to assume that it's competitive,

so we work it as quickly as possible.

Researcher Josh Crawford gets straight onto the job.

So, we found out from her death certificate

that Joyce Houlden,

she was born on 11th October 1923 in Bromley.

We also discovered that she was the widow of a Mr Houlden.

The first thing Josh needs to do is find the marriage record,

which will give them Joyce's maiden name.

We did a quick search and we discovered that

there was only one Joyce H marrying a Houlden pre-1974,

so the marriage was in Bromley, which is really good for us

because that's also the same place where Joyce was born.

At Joyce's house, Andrew's found evidence of her maiden name.

So, I was going through the wardrobe

and I found a number of letters from the House of Commons,

and then I have here a personal message

and it's signed Elizabeth R.

"Joyce Hilda Britten..." The deceased's maiden name.

"My appreciation for your loyal and devoted service as a member

"of the Women's Land Army from July 1943

"to the 2nd of January 1947."

Like many women in the 1940s,

Joyce helped the war effort by joining the Land Army.

The Land Army came about because the government

in their judgment took away the farm men for the army.

They also took them away from the mines.

So, they had to have somebody to do the work,

and they found that girls were only too willing to step in

and do what they possibly could.

Dorothy Taylor and Iris Newbold both worked on farms,

which is what Joyce had probably done.

That is my sister and I. Oh, yes.

And that is where we were working at Easton Farm.

And we had eight acres to take every single weed out.

I didn't realise what I had let myself in for,

because I had been working in an office nine till five.

I didn't even know there was a half past five in the morning,

but I soon learned.

And of course, when it was pouring with rain and snowing and blowing,

you still had to go.

And like Joyce, the hard work ethic has never left them.

You can take the girls out of the Land Army,

but you'll never take Land Army out of the girl.

I still grow onions out there and strawberries.

Anything I can fit in that tiny plot if I can bend down.

On a good day, I can bend.

On a bad day, it takes potluck cos I can't bend any more.

I am 90. Yep.

At the office, Josh is looking for any evidence

that Joyce and her husband George may have had children.

Doesn't look like there was any issued to the marriage,

so our next step is to go back a generation and work out

what's happened to the other kin.

Maybe she has siblings.

To do this, the team refer to Joyce's birth certificate,

which gives them the names of her parents.

Their marriage certificate is now key,

as it will give Joyce's mother's maiden name.

So, I've got there a marriage certificate here.

Joseph Britten marries on the 7th of June, 1923.

He's 50 years old at the time of marriage.

He's also an engraver on steel and copper.

He's a bachelor and his father's name is John Britten

and he was a printer's manager.

His wife, Joyce's mother, was Hilda Florence Pocock.

She was 25 years old. She was a spinster.

She had no profession, and her father was Sidney Albert Pocock,

who was a cabinet maker.

In 1896, Joyce's grandfather Sidney

married her grandmother Florence Gaywood,

and when the team searched for evidence of any other children,

they discovered something very interesting on the census records.

On the '01, they also listed infirmities,

and he is actually down as being totally deaf.

The team have done birth searches

and now found that Joyce's maternal grandparents

had four children in total.

They need to follow each line to see if they can find anyone

who is entitled to a portion of Joyce's estate.

But they weren't in luck.

Edith had died in childhood and Winifred's children had passed away.

This left only descendents of uncle Alfred's

who could be heirs.

From the stem of Alfred Ambrose Pocock,

we were able to establish, obviously, that he was married

and that he had several children.

Now, these were all Pococks.

We were able to find the birth records,

but after that, the trail went completely cold.

There must have been a reason for that.

We couldn't establish really any records after 1942,

which was very unusual.

So, really a stroke of luck was the records of Cyril Ambrose Pocock.

Now, he had a very unusual Christian name,

and we were able to locate records under the surname of Preston.

If we applied to that to the rest of the family,

we started finding everybody else's records.

So, there had been a family name change at some point,

and they had gone from Pocock to Preston.

With the name change cleared up, the team were able to find

a total of eight heirs on this side of the family.

But there was still more to uncover

on Joyce's father Joseph Britten's side.

On the 1891 census, Joseph had seven siblings,

the oldest of which was Frederick, who was 20 years old.

Then we had Joseph, who was 18 years old,

Emily, who was 16 years old, Ellen, who was 14.

We had Florence, who was 11, Lily, who was five,

and Rose, who was also five years old,

so they could possibly be twins.

The team checked an earlier census

to see if they had any older children,

and found one more.

There is actually an older child, Elizabeth, a daughter.

So, she is the eldest sibling of Joseph

and the oldest daughter of John and Sarah.

You've got to cover all bases and make sure you can, you know,

find as many people as possible.

And as the team began to look

for living descendents of Joyce's aunts and uncles,

they came across something interesting about Mary.

She had seven children,

and that was by the 1911 census, so...

Whereas most of the other parts of the family

were having just one child or even no children,

Mary, obviously, decided to make up for the rest of the family.

Mary had five sons and two daughters,

born between 1892 and 1905.

Mary's children,

they were the generation a lot of which went to war.

By the 1940s, Mary's youngest child David

was working as an interceptor and the Second World War.

David would listen into and record enemy radio transmissions.

Without volunteers like him,

there would've been no messages to decode.

Of those seven children of Joyce's aunt Mary,

the team managed to track down seven cousins once removed

and eight cousins twice removed.

So, in the end, on the paternal side of the family,

there were 17 heirs,

and the majority of those heirs come from Mary herself.

One of these heirs is David's daughter, Sylvia,

who never knew her father's cousin Joyce.

I was very surprised to know that I had any further relations

other than the ones I know.

I'd never heard the name Joyce Hilda Houlden before,

nor of her father Joseph.

It's very strange to inherit from somebody I never knew.

She was a stranger,

and there are all kinds of questions about what she was like.

It would have been nice to know her, I think.

But Sylvia does have fond memories of her own grandmother Mary,

who would've been Joyce's aunt.

I know that she was a suffragette - my parents told me about this -

and that she was there on the occasion,

or one of the occasions, I imagine, when Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested,

but she had to get home and get the dinner up

for her five sons and two daughters,

so she got on a tram and off she went.

I don't think she was ever arrested. I've never been told that.

The total value of all of Joyce's possessions,

including the sale of her house, came to ?300,000,

which will be split between all 25 heirs,

but for Sylvia, it isn't about the inheritance she will receive.

I'm quite content with what I have.

I've no ambitions to have a bigger house.

In fact, in some ways, I'd like it to be a little smaller.

But it is interesting just to know about her.

I wish she wasn't a stranger.

In some of the cases the heir hunters investigate,

trying to track down living heirs is like piecing together

a jigsaw puzzle with no picture to follow.

I've got her birth now, so hopefully, we can find her. OK.

One case that proved particularly tricky

was that of Arthur Sebastian Pickwell.

He lived in a small bedsit in St Albans

and passed away on the 5th of June 2014, aged 78.

His friend and work colleague Jennifer remembers him well.

I first met Arthur Pickwell in St Albans City Hospital

in about 1976 when I was a staff nurse

on the intensive care unit

and he worked next door in the operating theatres

as a theatre technician.

I think the surgeons put a lot of trust in Arthur

because he was vital to what they were doing.

If they needed something, Arthur knew where it was.

But it was after Arthur retired from his job

that he and Jennifer became friends.

He came to live just nearby to where we live,

and I used to see him walking up to down every day

to get his paper and his shopping.

He never came around to our house, even though I invited him.

He was quite content to be on his own.

Didn't really see him with any friends.

Every week, called round to see him.

And then when he became ill, he had to go for investigations.

My husband and I said we'd take him to the hospital,

and that was only a few weeks before he died.

As Arthur had passed away without making a will

and with no known family,

the details were picked up by senior case manager Amy Moyes

at London heir-hunting firm Finders.

With the surname Pickwell,

it looked like a pretty good surname to work with.

It's not particularly common.

It may be more common to wherever he may have been born,

but for the time being, it looked like a good surname to work with.

I did a birth search

looking for an Arthur Sebastian Pickwell

in Holbeach.

The one that popped up was an Arthur Pickwell,

no middle name, born in 1926.

I noticed straightaway that on the indexes

it noted that his mother's maiden name was Pickwell.

Either his mother and father were both Pickwells by birth,

which would probably be slightly unusual,

especially given the surname is less common,

or Arthur was actually an illegitimate child,

which would potentially make our work a lot more difficult.

I noticed that he didn't have a father noted

on his birth certificate.

I did think that this would be a lot harder than I first thought.

This meant that I couldn't do a marriage search

between his parents,

cos I just had the plain Annie Pickwell to work with.

Arthur's birth certificate gave them some clues that may help.

We noticed that Annie Pickwell was a domestic servant

at Holbeach Drove.

The team knew Annie Pickwell worked in a place called Holbeach Drove,

but Arthur's birth certificate said he was born in Shrubbery, Fleet.

Suzanne decided to investigate further.

So, I had a look and I found that The Shrubbery, Fleet

was actually a workhouse.

I found that often in these cases,

they give names to prevent embarrassment on birth certificates,

so that made me think that he probably wasn't aware

of his family.

He probably didn't know his mother Annie existed.

It seems as though he was born at the workhouse and left there.

Arthur's friend Jennifer remembers he did talk

about his upbringing on one occasion.

I once asked him had he got any family,

and he said, "I haven't," and that was quite a few years ago.

And from that conversation, I thought, "Poor man.

"He needs, you know,

"some...somebody to sort of, um, be his friend, I suppose."

Hmm. Yeah.

In 1926, when Arthur's mother Annie was pregnant with him,

she was a domestic servant so probably had little choice

but to go to the workhouse.

Peter Higginbotham has researched Britain's workhouses extensively.

The workhouse was the last place you would want to have a baby,

and anybody who possibly could would make other arrangements.

So, really, it was the people with no money,

and particularly the working class, who would end up there.

Annie Pickwell, as a single domestic servant in those days,

really wouldn't have had much option.

If you were a pregnant domestic servant,

you may well have lost your job.

Your family may have disowned you.

And to have a baby, you really need two things.

You need a place to have it

and possibly pay for a midwife or a doctor.

I mean, there were charities around,

but a lot of those wouldn't deal with single mothers.

It was only when the workhouse opened its doors to a single mother.

They didn't know anything about his original family.

Back at the office, the team were trying to see

if Arthur had any family he may never have known about.

Dealing with an illegitimate birth,

there are a number of issues that are thrown up.

For instance, being able to establish whether

there were any additional siblings, illegitimate or legitimate.

The only detail they had to go on was his mother's name,

Annie Pickwell, and the area she lived,

Holbeach in Lincolnshire.

Found that Annie didn't ever marry,

so then went on to see if she had any other children out of wedlock.

First of all, we started off in the Holbeach area,

cos if she had Arthur in Holbeach,

I assume she may have other children in that area.

'I did a Pickwell-Pickwell birth search

'and the first one that came up'

was for an Albert Pickwell in 1913 in Holbeach.

The birth certificate for Albert Pickwell was ordered.

It revealed that in fact

his mother was Annie Pickwell as well.

Domestic servant.

And again, the address comes up, Holbeach Drove,

which certainly links it back to Arthur.

He was born on 23rd of October 1913,

so that was actually 13 years previously.

So, it looked like Arthur had a brother who was also illegitimate.

If he had had any children,

they would be the heirs the team were looking for.

There were a few possibilities that I thought could've happened.

The first, that he may have gone abroad.

That's why nothing was coming up in the UK records.

Another possibility was that he might have grown-up

with another family using a different surname,

which made me think I needed to look a bit more into Annie

and into Holbeach Drove to find out more about the family.

They found that Annie Pickwell was born in 1889

and that her mother was also called Annie,

but there was no father listed.

It seems Arthur and Albert's mother had also been born illegitimate.

And now I'm going to look into another line

where we can start working on it now.

When Annie was two in 1891,

there were almost 1.4 million domestic servants

working inside Britain's homes.

The census for this year would give the team an idea

of the kind of life Annie and her mother were living then

and who they were living with.

The census showed that Annie Pickwell Snr

was working as a domestic servant in the household of Charles Alexander.

He had a family and they seemed to be their servants,

so it did a census search

and I couldn't find either Annie Pickwells on any censuses,

apart from this one, the 1891.

I then thought I should follow the Alexanders

to see what happened to them.

By that time of the next census in 1901,

things were quite different in the Alexander household

at Holbeach Drove.

I found that there was an Annie Alexander married

to a Charles Alexander.

This seems to show that Charles

actually married his domestic servant

after his wife had passed away.

Now married to her employer, the team discovered that

Charles Alexander had made an unusual gesture

towards his new wife's illegitimate daughter, Annie.

As being born out of wedlock was frowned upon during that era,

he listed her as a daughter,

so she seemed to fit in with the rest of the family,

but in fact, her birth name was Pickwell.

This finding had given the team that crucial lead

they needed with Arthur's half-brother Albert.

So, this discovery of the Alexander surname

then made me look back at Albert Pickwell,

which made me think he could have possibly taken on

the Alexander name.

The next step was to search for a death certificate

of an Albert Alexander with the same date of birth

as Albert Pickwell.

Straight away,

I found he only passed away down the road

from where he was actually born.

To me, this looked like this was definitely the correct person,

given the Alexander surname

links in with the rest of the family.

They now knew that Albert Alexander was the Albert Pickwell

they were looking for.

I found that he married,

but unfortunately, he had no children.

This led us back to square one.

But the hunt for Albert did unlock yet more family secrets.

When the team looked at the death certificate for Annie Pickwell Snr,

who'd married again and become Mrs Bloom,

grandson Albert was the informant,

but he was recorded as her son.

Him being listed as the son could've meant he grew up thinking

his grandmother was his mother

and actually his mother was his sister.

Which may also explain why Albert's name

was changed to Alexander when he was growing up.

So, when we deal with children who are born out of wedlock,

it's quite common that they are raised by another family.

Whether that's due to a formal adoption or an informal adoption,

there'll be a change of surname there

and that can make our job vastly more difficult when it comes

to tracing their whereabouts

or whether they've passed away or married.

In the early 20th century when Albert was born,

the social stigma of illegitimacy was very strong.

Families responded to illegitimacy with strategies

to try to minimise the damage,

so changing Albert's name, his surname,

to absorb him into a family where he could be raised

in a respectable way would've been a very common sleight-of-hand.

Children's right to know about their parentage

wasn't regarded as a kind of paramount right,

and it would've been quite common for children to later discover

that their auntie was in fact their mother or,

you know, their grandmother turned out to be

a different kind of relative.

But the question still remained why Albert was able to be adopted

by the Alexanders, but Arthur was sent to the workhouse.

Yeah, I'll look into that one. OK.

The team investigated further

and found that Charles Alexander died in 1913

and Annie Snr later remarried.

It does seem to be quite likely

that when Annie Snr married somebody new that

that really closed off the options for Annie Jr,

so that new husband might well have been really not interested

in dealing with any more illegitimate children,

so that would've made for some very tragic choices for Annie Jr.

Despite solving the riddle of Albert Pickwell

becoming Albert Alexander,

the team was still no closer to finding any heirs

to Arthur's estate.

We're a genealogy company.

For researcher Suzanne, it was back to the drawing board.

Bye-bye.

So, I searched for more births of Annie Pickwell,

the domestic servants,

and another birth came up in that area - Fred Pickwell.

Mother's maiden name, Pickwell.

So, again, this looked like another son of Annie.

Like Arthur, Fred was born after Charles Alexander had died,

and when his birth certificate arrived

there was no father listed

and his place of birth was the workhouse again.

At this point, I didn't think I would be able to find

any heirs for Arthur,

so another way I tried to find Fred Pickwell

was to search for a Fred using his date of birth.

AMY: We came up with one hit for a Fred Halgarth

who had passed away in 1992 in Holbeach.

Now, this is the exact area where Fred Pickwell had been born,

and so we were fairly confident that this was probably

our Fred Pickwell having simply changed his name.

In the circumstances like this one

where Fred had been born in a workhouse,

from time to time, you come across a situation where that child

perhaps was raised by another family,

so the child takes on a new surname rather than by official adoption.

The team found that Fred Halgarth had married Beatrice Hall in 1941

and they'd gone on to have a son, Raymond Halgarth.

From his marriage, the team located two heirs.

Fred Halgarth's grandson Karl

knew nothing about his grandfather's past,

and he had never heard of the name Pickwell.

I feel sorry for Annie Pickwell.

She grew up in a difficult time and she, obviously, made mistakes,

but, you know, no-one is there to judge, and they're not,

but unfortunately, she passed it on to my grandfather,

who was probably ashamed of what he was,

which was nothing bad.

All three children were illegitimate.

She was a legitimate. Her mother was illegitimate.

At the time then, it was taboo.

My dad didn't know anything because his father, my grandfather,

wouldn't tell him anything, and he wouldn't.

He couldn't talk about it,

and I feel quite sad that he couldn't about it

cos if it was my kids or grandkids, I'd want to tell them...

if I had a bad experience.

He never told his son.

And he used think a lot of me. He would never tell me.

He must've carried that around with him all his life.

Like, an anger and a hurt, and I feel sad for him.

But for Karl, it's opened up an avenue in his family

that he's going to continue to explore.

Me and my sister are going to go

down to see Arthur and Albert's graves.

My name is Halgarth, but I'm not sure now whether it is Halgarth.

Is it Pickwell or...?

I'm not sure. It's a strange, strange feeling.

That's the truth.

I don't quite know what I'm going to get round the corner.

Nadiya's journey across Bangladesh to explore her roots continues.

I have to keep pinching myself.

I cannot believe where I am right now.

That's all right.

Got my first selfie in Bangladesh!

I'm tempted to say, "Ahoy!"