Harris/Palmer Heir Hunters

Today, our heir hunters uncover long-forgotten tales of families

reshaped by conflict.

From there, you might be able to find a death...on mortality.

The first case has its roots planted firmly in London's East End.

It looks, at the moment, like that stem is dead.

And a second unearths family members who were heroes of war.

I feel very proud of my father because...

he went through such a lot to give us what we've got today.

It's a tough life on the front-line for the heir hunters.

Today, heir hunters at London-based probate genealogist firm

Fraser & Fraser are working on a case advertised

on the government legal department's unclaimed estates list.

When someone dies with no obvious next of kin,

and without leaving a will,

the search begins for beneficiaries to inherit their estate.

So, you end up with more than one.

We might be lucky.

Anne Harris was born on 10th August, 1916, in East London,

and she died on 26th March, 2013, in Tooting, aged 97.

Anne spent most of her life in the East End,

so travelling researcher Ewart Lindsay has been sent

by the team to her last known address in Stepney to see

if he can find neighbours who knew her

and who can provide clues to her life.

First of all, I'll speak to immediate neighbours...

to...to where Mrs Harris lived.

Then I'll extend it out to neighbours, you know,

beyond where she used to live.

Talking to neighbours can give you an insight to the background

of the deceased. It's a two-edged sword

because sometimes you could get information which might be

a bit misleading.

But, invariably, a neighbour who knew

the deceased for a number of years would have snippets

of information that, initially, would be really helpful to us.

HE KNOCKS ON DOORS

She lived at number 21?

Anne Harris, who worked as a shop assistant,

was born into an immigrant Jewish family.

They were very much East Enders

and, with a thriving Jewish community in London's East End,

would have felt very at home on the local streets.

Anne, growing up in East End,

would have seen an awful lot of changes over her life.

She was born in Poplar in 1916.

That area was booming when she was born,

but it's went from boom to bust.

But, through the tough times, locals stuck together.

Anne living here would have enjoyed...

Well, a sense of community.

The East End is well-known for its camaraderie.

It's a place where people mix,

where migrants from all communities get together.

There was a very big Jewish community here because

in the north part of this Beaumont Square

was the London Jewish Hospital

and that would have attracted an awful lot of the community to there.

There was a synagogue there. There was kosher kitchens.

Nearby, Ewart's had little luck with his research

in the block of flats that Anne used to call home.

Fingers crossed, I really do hope I get a neighbour to speak to.

He's not giving up.

After 25 years on the road, he knows that patience is a virtue.

How long have you been living here?

Finally, Ewart's found a neighbour who remembers Anne's family.

She's just provided him with a vital piece of information.

Anne had a brother, Jack, who lived with her in this block of flats.

Take care. All the best. Thank you.

To us, it's a massive help.

I mean, she's given us a brother,

the name of the brother, you know...

And he lived here as well, so it's...

..it's good information to us.

On the whole, it's been a good day, you know.

I think we're nearer to finding family now...

..which is the main objective.

In the office, case manager Gareth Langford has been hard at work

trying to crack Anne Harris' case.

With just a few clues from Ewert

and a relatively common surname to deal with,

the job of tracking down the right person is a tricky one.

So, when the government legal department released

the information, they gave us some basic details.

Anne Harris, passed away in 2013.

We know that she'd been married

and we know that her maiden name was Myers,

but we're obviously still dealing with a Harris surname.

The first task is to locate Anne Harris's marriage certificate,

so the team can begin to build her family tree.

We know that she was married to Norman David Harris,

but we're not too interested in him.

We're really interested in Annie.

And she's known as Annie Myerovitch and she's 32 years old, a spinster.

She's living in...in the Poplar area

and she's the daughter of Lewis Myerovitch,

who's a lost property dealer.

So, there's quite a lot of information there.

We've got an address that will be really useful to us, but,

most importantly, we've got some new names. The next step, really,

was locating that all-important birth certificate.

What made this search tricky was the fact that

her name is Anne Myers,

but, erm...Myers is obviously anglicised, so Myerovitch,

so the family may switch between Myerovitch and Myers,

so that makes the search that much harder.

So, finding her birth is a lot harder because you need to do

several searches rather than just one straight search.

So, I found her birth.

She was actually born in the September quarter of 1916

in Mile End.

And, on the birth certificate, Anne was registered as Annie.

We have a great deal of difficulty when families change their name

in identifying not only their original surname,

but often the first names as well

because they often will anglicise the first name.

This is especially the case with Jewish families who,

during the wars, often changed their name

so the names appeared more...British, I'd say.

So, with Anne's name confirmed, and her birth certificate found,

the next step is to locate her parents' marriage.

And, from this, the family tree can grow.

Once found, it showed that Anne's father had also

anglicised his first name on her marriage certificate.

They married in Mile End in December quarter of 1915.

Her father was Lazarus Myerovitch and her mother was Kate Maginsky.

Armed with both Anne's parents' names,

the next step is to find brothers and sisters for her.

And after Ewart's initial detective work,

the team verify that she did have at least one brother - Jack Myers.

He was born in 1923 and we couldn't find any other records for him.

We couldn't find a marriage record,

but what we did locate was his death record.

He passed away on 13th February, 2009.

Again, living in Tower Hamlets, so he hadn't gone far.

Doesn't look like the family have moved anywhere, really.

Jack Myers was an East Ender through and through.

And, as the team delve deeper into his past,

they discover that, as a young Jewish lad, aged just 13,

he had become embroiled in a clash with antifascist demonstrators

on his home turf, spurred on by the terror Jews were facing in Europe.

It was the mid-1930s.

There was high unemployment, and poverty,

and people were turning to extreme political parties.

In Italy, in Germany, fascists had taken power.

In Spain, there was a bloody civil war going on with fascists

struggling to take power there.

And, in Britain, the British Union of Fascists,

a new fascist political party, was set up by Sir Oswald Mosley.

Mosley was a British politician and a close ally of fascist Italy.

Aged 22, he became the youngest MP in the House of Commons.

He formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932

and wasn't a fan of multicultural Britain.

There were immigrants in East End from all over Europe,

from Germany, from Italy,

and there was a big population of immigrant Jews in the East End,

and these were the scapegoat for the British union of Fascists.

They blamed the Jews for the economic problems that were

hitting the East End so very hard.

The final straw was in October 1936, when the British Union of Fascists

planned a march through the streets of the East End.

It was a deliberately intimidatory act.

It was October 4th and 100,000 counterdemonstrators came

to the streets of the East End to protest against the fascist march.

There, they blocked Cable Street in an attempt

to bring the march to a halt.

There were 10,000 policemen on duty that day to try to force a way

through for the fascists to march because they had a right to march -

that was their legal right.

But Jack Myers and his fellow protesters

were successful in their mission.

Eventually, the police realised that the popular feeling in East End

was against this march

and they re-routed it, and the march fizzled away.

But the march left around 175 casualties in its wake

and the unruly events of that day have since been dubbed

the Battle of Cable Street.

It was a historic day for the East End

because it was the first time that people came together

from all different communities,

young and old, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and non-Jew

came together to defend the streets of the East End

as a place where people must live and could live together.

Back in the office,

the hunt for Anne Harris's relatives was continuing.

The team were looking further into Jack's life to see

if he had provided any heirs.

From the information on his record, we know that he was a market trader.

And...

..that it didn't look like, from the death record,

that he had any family, or certainly no children.

So, the trail for Anne's heirs had reached a dead end, with both

Anne her brother Jack passing away with no immediate next of kin.

But it wasn't long before a new clue came to light that would bring

Anne Harris's case back to life.

Initially from our research,

we believed Jack was the only sibling of the deceased.

But, looking at the records,

and the information that was coming through, it transpired that there

was, in fact, another sibling of the deceased, Barnett Myers.

Up and down the land,

heir hunters are on the trail of beneficiaries of people who

have passed away with no apparent next of kin and leaving no will.

In an attempt to collate clues and grow family trees,

they hope to be led to their living heirs.

Hello?

It's the case of retired factory worker Lesley Palmer

that the team from Finders in London are working on today,

after it came to them via a private referral.

THEY CHAT INAUDIBLY

Lesley sadly passed away in a care home

in Hatfield in Hertfordshire aged 85 in 2009.

Ryan and the team have limited information to kick off

their search for potential heirs.

In the instruction, we received his date of birth, date of death

and his last known address.

Yes, that was a long shot anyway.

We thought he owned his property, and we were working

on the assumption that the estate was worth over £100,000.

But since Lesley died over six years ago, it would mean Ryan

and his colleagues would have to work a little bit harder

to unearth more clues.

No, on there, you might be able to find a death...on mortality.

It can cause some issues for us in terms of trying to find out

more information on the person.

This can be because the staff have moved on from the care home

that the person was resident in, or it may be as simple as neighbours

have moved away from the area that the deceased person had lived.

While Ryan and the team are hard at work in the office,

travelling researcher Howard Kleinberg hit the road on the hunt

for new information about Lesley Palmer from his neighbours.

It's the team on the ground who can bring in invaluable clues

when the team in the office are faced with a tricky case.

Sometimes, you may know where someone lives.

But unless you're confident of their name,

you can't actually find out a phone number,

so knocking on the door is always the best bet

to try and confirm that.

And neighbours and people in the local area who may know them.

Howard's been pounding the streets in Hatfield

where Lesley Palmer lived, but to no avail.

We've been to the address which he did live at. No-one at the address.

Knocked on a couple of neighbours' addresses.

Not too many people knew much about him, to be honest.

He was a bit of a loner. Wasn't aware of his marital status, really,

and weren't aware of visitors that he was having.

Although the job of a travelling research is a crucial one,

it doesn't always bear fruit.

It's a bit sad inasmuch that the guy was obviously known...

but people are either reluctant to talk about him

or he wasn't that well-known.

After his tour of the neighbourhood, Howard is none the wiser

about the life and circumstances of Lesley Palmer.

This lands even more weight square on the shoulders

of the search back in the office.

The first step for us was to find his birth entry.

There were none in Hertfordshire, so we had to look further afield.

We knew that he was born in the December of 1923.

However, he was born right at the end on 24th December -

that's Christmas Eve -

and I imagine they would not have been able to register his birth

until the following year.

We jumped to the March quarter of 1924.

We saw that there were three Lesley Palmer's born

in the March quarter of 1924 without a middle initial.

There was one in Barrow, one in West Ham and one in Bristol.

We narrowed it down to the one in West Ham, as Lesley

passed away in Hertfordshire,

and this appears to be the closest location.

The birth certificate is the key to unlocking the door

to Lesley's past and to getting the search well off the ground.

When Lesley Palmer's birth certificate came through,

we were able to see that his father was Enoch Palmer

and that his mother was Julie Palmer, formerly Robinson.

The occupation of his father was a bootmaker.

Finally, the heir hunters had set off on the road which would

hopefully lead them to Lesley's heirs.

They now knew that he hailed from the East End of London,

and could start building a picture of his life and where he grew up.

I think the area was, back in those days,

was a very tightknit community.

Everybody down the street used to speak to each other and say hello,

know everybody's names...and, yes, it was a good community to live in.

People didn't move, in those days, didn't move too far away

from where their...

where their parents and grandparents were born and brought up.

Now they knew who Lesley's parents were, the team could put

the information to use to find out if they'd had any other children.

First, they had to find a record of his parents' marriage.

There's an Enoch Palmer marrying a Julie Robinson

in the September quarter of 1912 in West Ham.

Given that Lesley's parents were married in 1912

and he was born in 1923, we would anticipate there may have been

some children born within that timeframe.

But, given the First World War,

there may have been a gap prior to Lesley being born.

There maybe wouldn't have been as many children to that marriage

as there would have been at any other time.

World War I disrupted families,

as fathers were enlisted to fight for their country -

exactly what happened to Lesley's father

nine years before he was born.

At the war's root was Britain and the Allied forces going

head-to-head with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Enoch Palmer enlisted in the army and, after only four months

on the front line, he was taken captive by the Germans.

He was held in an allied prisoner of war camp

called Giessen near Frankfurt.

He was captured on 12th February, 1916,

when the enemy mounted a large trench raid

against the position that his unit was holding north of Ypres.

He was one of 39 men captured on that day.

They were the lucky ones.

A number of their comrades perished.

Prisoners of war were not uncommon in these times,

and, although the men were glad to be alive,

life in captivity was tough.

The conditions in the prisoner of war camps

generally were fairly harsh.

Little food, little comfort, men were living in unheated huts

and that sort of thing.

Luckily for Enoch Palmer,

his time as a prisoner of war wasn't as bad as it could have been.

The accounts of Giessen show that it's one of the better camps of all.

Very large.

Huts were built to accommodate the men, thousands of men.

But, over the years, other facilities were added which

at least gave some social life to prison camp day-to-day existence.

Even so, as the war continued, conditions deteriorated.

Germany itself also began to struggle economically

as the war went by, with increasing shortages of food, in particular,

and, naturally, this feeds down to the prison camps.

If the population around is not eating, then you can bet

the prisoners of war are going to feel the sharp end of that shortage.

Not knowing how Lesley's father was, the worry for his mother Julia

and the rest of the family was unimaginable.

Enoch would have been able to communicate with his family

only very infrequently.

There was a possibility of sending letters home,

but he knew full well that there was a censorship regime going on

and what he was allowed to say was going to be very limited.

Some men managed to escape,

but, for those who didn't,

their liberation came with the end of the war, on November 11th, 1918.

In many, many of the cities, towns and villages of the country,

civic receptions were held to welcome them home.

Little parties, street parties, things going off in town halls

and the like to welcome the prisoners of war back.

Enoch's nearest and dearest were thrilled to have him home

and he slipped back into family life.

Although a picture was coming alive of Lesley Palmer's father,

it didn't help the heir hunters

in their quest to find his living relatives.

The search was still on for any siblings.

Maybe get us a couple of certs and see.

Once we had Lesley's parents' marriage certificate,

we established that both of his parents were aged 25 in 1912.

Using that, we knew we had a definitive end date

to the birth search for any siblings of Lesley.

That took us to 1932, so we were really seeing

whether there was anybody else born in West Ham within that timeframe.

In 1932, Lesley's mother Julia would have been 45,

so the search for siblings of his continued.

And, as investigations rolled on,

some surprising new facts about his family history came to light.

Interesting for us that we found out that Lesley's father

and his brother both fought against the Germans but in different wars.

What he's seen in those five or six years...

-Yeah.

-..must have been terrible.

Every year in Britain, thousands of people get a surprise

knock on the door from the heir hunters.

You tend to sort of think to yourself, "Well, I'm not sure

"if this is real or not." So it was quite a surprise.

Today, we've got details of two estates on the

Treasury Solicitor's Bona Vacantia list that are yet to be claimed.

The first case is that of Constance Sylvia Burleigh Martin,

who died in Newport on the Isle of Wight on 29th June, 1993, aged 77.

She was born on 21st July, 1915, in Plumstead, London.

Interestingly, she had two aliases -

Constance Sylvia Gingell and Constance Sylvia Burleigh Gingell.

Her parents were Londoners, Lancelot Augustus Hand Gingell,

who died in 1954 in Sydenham,

and Dorothy Martin, who died in Lambeth.

The next case is that of Peggy Lisney, who died on 26th June, 1993

in the London Borough of Sutton.

She was born in 1924 in Hendon, which was then in Middlesex,

on either 15th July or 3rd August, with the name Daisy William.

She was informally adopted and given the name Peggy Lisney.

As this was before the 1926 Adoption Act,

it was carried out without legal sanction

and adopted children did not have the rights of natural children.

However, it also means adoptive relatives

can benefit from her estate.

If you think you might be related to either of these people,

you would need to make a claim on their estate

through the government legal department.

Once again, the names of the cases we are trying to solve

with your help today are...

Heir hunters from Fraser & Fraser in London are searching for

beneficiaries of the late Anne Harris' estate.

Anne was the daughter of an immigrant Jewish family,

and was born and bred in London's East End.

When she sadly passed away in 2013, she was 97 years old.

All the people who are migrating anywhere would have

arrived in London and that's because it's close to the docks.

And, like most migrants, would not have travelled very far,

so they would have settled not far from the docks.

Anne's parents owned a tobacconist and sweet shop in Poplar,

but, when World War II broke out in 1939,

they knew their London life was going to change forever.

It was in 1940 that the war really hit Anne's family

and their fellow East Enders.

Before then, times were tough,

but Londoners' lives had not been in danger.

That all changed when Hitler decided to drop bombs on the capital

and the Blitz commenced.

When the air campaign by the Luftwaffe to bomb London commenced

on 7th September, the East End really was their target.

The East End at that time was the home of the London docks,

really one of the major, major docks in the world.

It was also the home of many key industries,

so the Luftwaffe really saw this as a key strategic target and,

for the first week of the Blitz,

they really kept their focus on the East End.

Residents had to take action to stay safe.

The government supplied around two million tin shelters,

called Anderson shelters,

for people to use in their own homes to protect themselves.

Around 27%-29% of people had their own shelters outside their home.

Around 4% of people used the underground

and I think many people will be familiar with images of people

queueing up to go into underground stations,

people sleeping on underground station platforms.

The most surprising thing is that over 60% of Londoners

preferred to stay in their own beds during raids.

But for those who decided to seek safety within the shelters,

conditions were cramped, dark, cold and damp.

This shelter would be much, much more secure

than simply staying in your own bed during an air raid.

If we look inside the shelter,

you'll really be able to see how small it is inside there.

People really were packed in.

People would take their own heating with them

but there wouldn't be electricity supplied to these shelters.

Living in the heart of the East End, Anne's family home and shop

were in the area targeted by bombs.

The family was evacuated to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire,

where they were safer.

And, after eight dreadful months, the Blitz ended.

May 1941, when the Germans decided that they would invade

the Soviet Union, as it then was,

and so the bombing fleet was required for that operation,

and then London had a relatively calm experience

for the next two or three years.

And Londoners concentrated on recovering

and rebuilding their lives, their homes and their city.

In the office, the team was still hard at work trying

to piece together Anne's family tree.

After learning she had a younger brother, Jack, who had passed away,

leaving no children,

the search was going to move back a generation in the hope

of finding uncles and aunts who might provide cousins and heirs.

It was at this point that a crucial new piece of evidence

came to the surface.

It came to light that the executor of Jack Myers' estate,

when he died in 2009,

was a Neil Myers. Sharing the family name, who was he?

The obvious thing for us to do was locate Neil and speak to him,

try and find out how was he connected to the deceased.

Unfortunately for us, he was living in the United States

and we couldn't actually track him down,

but what we were able to do was find a birth record for him.

And from that birth record, we noted that he had brothers and sisters.

And, from that record, we could start working backwards

and tie in his family to our deceased.

Neil Myers' birth records revealed that his father

was one Barnett Lionel Myers, also known as Myerovitch.

With these two surnames listed, the heir hunters surmised that

Barnett must have had a connection to Anne.

Next, the team had to locate his birth record.

The reason we had trouble trying to locate the birth record

of Barnett was it comes back down to variants of the names.

Not only were we dealing with a variant of the surname,

but also the maiden name. In fact, quite dramatic variants.

So, on the normal search, he wouldn't come up.

But now we had his Christian name, Barnett,

we could look at all the variants and really do a detailed search.

And, eventually, we found his birth record in Whitechapel in 1919.

And with Barnett's birth record in hand,

the team managed to trace his parents.

They discovered they were none other than Lazarus Myerovitch

and Kate Maginsky.

Barnett was Anne Harris' brother.

It was already known that Barnett had one son, Neil,

so the search had finally borne fruit

and an heir of Anne's had been found -

something that was a happy surprise for everyone.

Well, to be honest, I pretty much thought the job was dead

because it looked like there was no-one else

in the family still alive.

With one heir finally discovered, next, the team

needed to find out if Barnett had any other children

in addition to Neil, as they would also be Anne's beneficiaries.

But the marriage certificate for Barnett couldn't be located,

so the search had once again hit a brick wall.

There wasn't anything coming up in England,

so I decided to have a look and do a world search of the marriage.

Given Barnett is quite an unusual first name,

luckily I came up with a marriage in Egypt.

I discovered that Barnett Lionel Myers married Miriam Moreno.

They married on 29th January, 1945, in Cairo.

At 23 years of age,

while his family were suffering in the Blitz in London,

Barnett Myerovitch was a sergeant in the RAF, stationed in Cairo.

There, he met a Jewish Egyptian girl called Miriam Moreno

and, in 1945, they were married in Cairo.

With this vital piece of information,

the team could find out if Barnett and Miriam had had any more children

in addition to Neil, who would also be heirs of Anne's.

We established that there were four children

from the marriage of Barnett.

Neil, who was the one bit of the jigsaw that cracked the case.

Anne's niece Zoe remembers her aunt very clearly.

Anne was the elder sister of my father.

We always called her Auntie Anne.

She was a very diminutive woman, like her mother.

I think maybe not more than 4'9", 4'10" maximum.

My mum said she was quite a stunning woman in her day

because she was blonde, and had deep blue eyes,

and, in a Jewish community, my mum said she could have had her pick.

Although she was tiny and very fragile, she was extremely tough

and tenacious at the same time.

Growing up in a troubled part of London, residents had to be

thick-skinned and, as a family, the Myerovitches stuck together.

Zoe remembers tales of Chalky's,

Anne's father, her grandfather's shop.

Back in the day, it was very well-known locally.

It was a sweet and tobacconist's. I don't think it sold newspapers.

People used to queue around the block for Chalky's Penny Wafers.

And then, I think, my father went off to war

and the shop got bombed out.

Zoe's father, Barnett, died in 2006.

Sadly, his death signalled the end of her relationship

with her auntie Anne.

After I lost my father and my mother,

I tried to...stay in touch with her

and offered to make some sort of regular visits to ensure

some of her wellbeing, and...

she wasn't really open to that suggestion.

So, unfortunately, as a result of that, we lost touch.

What started off as a wild goose chase had now come full circle,

and four nieces and nephews had been found to inherit

Anne Harris' estate, thought to be over £5,000.

Quite satisfying, really, that we got to the heirs eventually.

Today, Zoe is glad to be reunited with memories

of her long-lost aunt and of days gone by.

It is a bittersweet thing because sometimes I would see

glimpses of someone that I was really fond of.

I don't have a large family.

I was quite keen on the idea and the notion of aunts and uncles,

and I used to quite like the way she mothered me.

For some of my childhood, she did figure quite highly.

In London, heir hunters from probate genealogists firm

Finders have been delving into the case

of retired factory worker Lesley Palmer.

Although he was an East Ender, Lesley moved to Hatfield

in Hertfordshire, where he died aged 85 in 2009.

He left no will and had no apparent next of kin.

Yep. If you want to add all of those three possible children to the tree.

The team have discovered

his parents were Enoch Palmer and Julia Robinson,

and were now looking to see if Lesley had any siblings.

First of all, we would look for other births between a Palmer

and a Robinson in the London area.

We can see that Enoch and Julia had three more children.

First of all, they had Violet Isabel,

born on 30th September, 1914.

Once we had Violet's birth certificate,

we could then do a marriage search for her,

but also, given that we had her full date of birth,

it could mean we could jump another step and go directly to

identifying a potential death cert for her.

We can see that there is a Violet I Palmer born in 1914,

who died in 1964.

This would mean that she died as a spinster at the age of 50.

With confirmation that Violet had passed away with no children,

the search moved onto her younger sister, Gladys.

We can see there is a Gladys Palmer, who passed away in 1976 in Newham.

Gladys also passed away as a spinster at the age of 60 years old.

So, with two sisters providing no nieces or nephews for Lesley,

the family tree might need to be broadened to take in maternal

and paternal cousins, meaning a much bigger workload

for Ryan and the team.

We knew that the Palmer family was very large and we knew...

Well, we know from experience that Robinson is not a very easy

surname to work with, so, at this point, we're slightly

concerned as to how this case may escalate out of control.

But before they were forced to turn their search to aunts and uncles,

there was one more name that came to light -

an older brother of Lesley's.

If we were going to find any close kin who'd be entitled

to inherit from the estate,

all our hopes really rested on the line of Ronald Enoch Palmer.

A Ronald E Palmer's birth record was found on the birth index

and his birth certificate was ordered.

This was how the team would confirm

if they had found the right Ronald E Palmer.

He was born on 4th September, 1919.

Again, confirming his parents names as Enoch and Julia.

It gives us Enoch's occupation as a boot repairer.

From having Ronald's birth certificate,

we then had a look to see if we could find any marriages for him.

Given his age and his father's military background, we had to

bear in mind that he may also have been involved in active service.

Now, the good thing was, when we found his marriage entry in 1945,

we could see that, luckily, he survived the war.

He came back and married Hazel, who was about six years his junior.

We could then hope they may have had children.

If they had, they would be Lesley's nieces or nephews and his heirs.

Luckily, we found out that himself and his wife had one son

called Brian in 1946 and another called David in 1949.

With the existence of Lesley's nephews confirmed,

it didn't take long to track them down to Essex.

My uncle Lesley was

a part of my life in the early part of my life.

We had some holidays together,

we had some nice times together.

Unfortunately, we drifted apart and had become estranged,

so it was quite a shock out of the blue

when the heir hunters actually phoned me.

When I was younger, I can remember him being caring

and wanting to talk to you, and everything.

I can remember him being slim.

Always in a suit and a tie.

I suppose it was quite upsetting, really, that we found out

that our uncle Lesley had passed away.

It would have been nice to talk to him, and for my family

to have met him, to have known

that he was part of our family as my uncle.

After much hard work, the heir hunters were glad

they'd finally succeeded in finding Lesley's next of kin.

Unfortunately, though,

the early estimate of his estate turned out to be wrong.

Lesley didn't own his property as they had believed.

It was a few thousand pounds, but, obviously,

this is still a welcome sum of money for anybody to receive.

There was just two heirs.

In terms of our involvement, it was still a successful case for us.

The biggest reward that I feel is actually making

some sort of contact and put some extra links in the chain

of his existence with my own father,

and the rest of the family.

Lesley's case has made Brian

and David consider their own family history.

Their father, Ronald Enoch Palmer, died in 1993 and

at the forefront of their thoughts is his experience of World War II.

He volunteered to join the Army to go and fight for his country.

He served in Africa, North Africa. He dropped in Arnhem in a glider.

He came out, fortunate to get out of Arnhem.

And then he went to Palestine. And, from Palestine, he was demobilised.

I feel very proud of my father because...

he went through such a lot to give us what we've got today.

With the memory books opened,

Lesley's nephews have come to the Royal Artillery Museum in London

to learn more about their father's time spent fighting for his country.

Paul Evans is the librarian here

and has access to Ronald Enoch Palmer's war records.

So, what we have, originally, he enlists,

and he goes to the 50th Anti-tank Training Regiment,

so he was going to be an anti-tank gunner.

So that's his first fighting unit, OK?

But that's in the United Kingdom.

He was at Dover, Dover Castle, for a while.

-Would that be the time he was at Dover Castle?

-Yes.

That would fit very nicely indeed.

I think that's where he got a Defence Medal for that.

There's the 39-45 Star, he gets the Italy Star,

he gets the War Medal,

the France and Germany Medal and the Defence Medal.

So, we know, at some point, he's in Italy.

We know, at some point, he's in France and Germany.

And we also know he also does three years

defending the United Kingdom, so we know that.

He then passes a trade test

-and is qualified for the appointment as an equipment repairman.

-Yes.

OK, so that's his job. He's now repairing all the equipment

that anti-tank regiment and battery are using.

That's everything, from compasses up to guns.

From 1943 to 1945, he's with the 1st Airlanding Light

and they are part of the airborne forces.

Now, air landing goes with the airborne forces,

so by glider and by parachute.

What else did he tell you?

He didn't actually tell us what his progress in his career

through the Army at all.

He just came out with snippets.

It's the development of the airborne forces,

he's been involved in it from day one.

But although Ronald Palmer was a member of the airborne forces,

his wartime experience was not spent in the air,

like David and Brian believed.

We know he's an equipment repairman.

He's not in the glider. He's not the assault troops, OK?

He's going by ship, later. He's the support staff.

On 17th September, 1944,

Allied troops joined forces in the Battle of Arnhem.

The largest airborne and glider operation in history

saw 5,000 aircraft descend on the Dutch city.

Their aim was to advance into Germany and end the war.

The combined air and land mission

was known as Operation Market Garden.

Ronald Palmer was part of the operation and arrived by road

after the landings had taken place.

So when we thought he landed in the gliders, he didn't.

-He was trying to provide them with equipment.

-That's it.

He'd got Germans to the left and right of him

and everybody's shooting at him.

-So where he thought he was, he wasn't.

-He wasn't.

Unfortunately, Operation Market GARDEN was not a success.

The Allied forces failed and couldn't advance further.

On the ground, Ronald and his fellow soldiers had arrived late

and were greeted with casualties of war.

He's with the tanks trying to get there.

-Trying to get through to the...

-He's the rescue party at the other end.

They didn't get there.

They're the party that didn't get to Arnhem,

but when they got there, he got there in time to get the survivors,

so he did a vital role rescuing the survivors.

They reckon that, if they'd have took Arnhem, that would have

-shortened the war, and it would have saved a lot of lives.

-Absolutely.

The mental pressure would be immense on him.

It must have been really tough, really.

-He has not had a good war.

-No, he hasn't.

What he's seen in those...five or six years...

..must've been terrible.

After the failed mission in Arnhem,

the brothers know their father was posted to many more countries with

the 1st Airborne Regiment before the war ended and he was sent home.

He found it hard to talk about. He wouldn't talk to us about it.

Yes, absolutely. He doesn't want to remember it.

Thanks very much for going through the history.

-No problem, my pleasure.

-Yes, thank you, Paul.

And for putting it all together.

Not only had the sad event of Lesley Palmer's passing reconnected him

with his estranged nephews, but they'd also been given

the gift of adding to their own family history.

It's all about memories, things that can...

we can look at, and see our uncle and our dad together.

That'll be better for us to see

rather than what any money could give us, really.