Rixon/Hall Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters are struggling to find a family...

The Rixons actually seem to be quite difficult to find.

They're keeping themselves well-hidden.

..but the clock is ticking.

With the competitive nature, I need some information from somebody.

It's one of these ones here.

KNOCK ON DOOR

Hello. Mr England?

Another team discover a sailor stopped at nothing

to fight for his country.

From what we know, a lot of young men lied about their age back then

just to get into the Army or the Navy.

Could long-lost family have been living round the corner all along?

It's a really weird feeling to think that she lived here all of her life

and what secrets that house would hold and what memories.

Up and down the country, heir hunters search

for long-lost family members who may be about to receive

a surprise windfall.

Hello?

One of these searches involved Patricia Hall,

who died in January 2015 aged 84.

She lived alone in the leafy London suburb of Golders Green.

I've known Pat ever since I was a baby.

She and her family

lived nextdoor to my grandmother.

She was very pleasant, very nice, but she was very quiet

and quite reserved.

Living across the road from Patricia,

I found her to be a very nice, elegant lady.

In her younger years she was always about

and she always knew a lot of what was happening in the area

and stuff like that and very, very good to the elderly people

in the area.

Pat was very close to her parents and she looked after them,

she was very good to them and she worked hard

and kept them when they were older.

When her mother died, sort of lived in the house,

continued living in the house.

Was a bit of a recluse, kept herself to herself.

I think she worked at John Lewis, then retired.

I never saw any friends or family visiting her over a period of

the time I was here.

She kept mainly to herself.

She did have a friend for a while she used to go out with

but he died, I think, quite suddenly,

so from that time on I didn't really know her

to have any other, sort of, partner.

With no known family and without leaving a will,

it's up to case manager Ben Cornish and his team

at London-based heir hunting firm Fraser and Fraser

to track down heirs to her estate.

Just draw a little tree up of that, will you?

The first thing on this case, what we do is search for a birth

for our deceased, so Patricia Louise Rose Hall.

Having a look at that, I've found one which is a Patricia RL Hall,

mother's maiden name, Kerridge.

She's born in the correct quarter, in the December quarter, in 1930,

in Hendon.

As there's always the potential for a rival firm to be on the trail,

the heir hunters need to work quickly...

Right, let me take some notes of these.

..especially as the estate is valuable.

So, after doing some digging, we found that this estate was worth

just under half a million.

It's quite a big estate,

which meant there was going to be some competition on it,

so we really have to work fast.

Although we know that Patricia never married

we weren't sure if she ever had any children,

so that's something that we had to verify straightaway.

Obviously, they would have a prior claim than any brothers and sisters

or nieces and nephews.

So, we had to make some enquiries and we soon discovered quite quickly

that she had no children.

The team then need to look for any brothers and sisters,

but finding records proves a challenge

because of her father's name, Alfred William Hall.

Her mother was Edith Rose Kerridge.

The name Hall is quite a common surname,

it's not just set in one area, like you get area names.

Hall can be across the country,

so it can be quite difficult to research.

So, when we come across a surname, a common surname,

it means the research is a lot harder.

But it's not just harder for us, it's harder for the competition,

so we don't mind, it just means a bit more research.

Their research tracks down Patricia's parents

who were born at the turn of the century.

So, I've got the marriage certificate for the parents

for an Alfred William Hall, aged 22, he was a bachelor,

he was a general labourer, marrying an Edith Rose Kerridge,

who's 21, she's a spinster and she's a laundress.

They're both living on the same road.

Alfred, it looks like he lives at 142

and Edith lives at 148.

So, it's quite sweet that they sort of met on the same road

and fell in love.

Records establish that early in Patricia's father's life,

he had a military career.

Alfred William Hall joined the Navy in 1916,

two years after the outbreak of World War I,

when the age of conscription was 18.

And the heir hunter's research found he'd gone to quite some lengths

to ensure he served his country.

I've found a naval record for an Alfred William Hall.

He's born in 1898, he's born on 16th of April

and our Alfred William Hall is born 16th of October in Hendon

and this gentleman is also born in Hendon.

From what we know, a lot of young men lied about their age back then

just to get into the army or the navy,

so he could have put his birth back a few months

to make himself seem older than what he was.

But it gives us a description of Alfred at this time.

We know that he's 5'1", he has a 32-inch chest,

he's got brown hair, hazel eyes and has a fresh complexion

and a scar on his foot.

With Patricia's parents dying in the '70s,

the team continued their search for any brothers and sisters

who could be potential heirs.

I would rely more on the maternal side now.

We're just going to look in the area of Hendon first

because that is where she's born.

And I can see that she's got two brothers -

one called Leonard and one called Alfred.

So, when we looked into the deceased's two brothers,

we found out that Alfred, the elder of the two brothers,

was born in 1922 and he died in 2007 without any children.

I did a basic general search for a death for Leonard

from 1916 to 2007,

nothing came up so my next search was the Commonwealth War Graves.

I have come across a Leonard John Albert Hall,

who died on 6 June 1944,

which obviously coincides with the D-Day landings

and he is in fact a Royal Marine at this point

and he is buried in France.

So, it would be safe to assume that he probably was one of those killed

on the beaches that day.

The D-Day landings on 6 June 1944 were the largest combined naval,

air and land assault in history.

With allies arriving on the beaches of Normandy to overthrow

Nazi-occupied northern France.

D-Day is significant historically

as the invasion of northwest Europe.

Within the context of the Second World War,

it was the invasion that gave hope to Western Europe.

This marked, potentially, the end of the war for them and as such,

D-Day and Leonard's small part in it, is very significant.

Leonard was 21 when the marines stormed the beach.

Men had to carry water, rations, a gas mask, their rifle,

ammunition and grenades - it was a frightening experience.

The commando would have experienced its first casualties

from indirect fire and direct fire from the Germans.

So, you had shellfire and mortar fire hitting craft as they ran in.

You had machine-gunners engaging the landing craft

from positions on the coast.

Things went very wrong and there were casualties amongst the men,

even before they'd got off the landing craft.

Some of the casualties would have been amongst men who simply drowned.

They'd fallen in the water, the weight of their equipment

had held them down and they drowned.

That's simply not from any kind of enemy action.

At the end of the day, the commandos suffered huge casualties,

tragically losing over 50% of their men, including Leonard.

Significantly, his body was found, he was buried

and he's now buried at Bayeux Cemetery,

which is a place of pilgrimage for anybody visiting Normandy.

With Leonard's life sadly cut short without having children,

the heir hunters were still to find any heirs to Patricia's estate.

If anyone's free to trace any of those people...

..that'd be great.

They would now have their work cut out

investigating Patricia's wider family,

so the search moved back a generation to her father's parents.

Patricia's grandfather on her father's side was George Alfred Hall

and grandmother Mary Ann Parker.

They married in 1896 in Hendon, north London

and between them had four children

including Patricia's aunts Alice and Emily and uncle John.

So, when we were looking into the aunts and uncles

on the paternal side of the family,

we discovered that the youngest aunt, Emily, had one son, Graham,

but sadly he passed away in infancy.

We soon discovered that Alice and John both had families.

So, when we completed research on the paternal side,

in total we had five beneficiaries descending from two stems.

The team had found potential heirs but had yet to meet them

and their research into the family trees still had surprises in store.

Quite a waste of a life and quite a horrific way to die, to be honest.

It's Tuesday morning in the London office of heir hunters Finders.

Both those certificates have been ordered,

they'll phone in about an hour with the rest of the information.

OK. Yeah, cos I might need those. Thank you very much.

Case managers Amy Moyes and Ryan Gregory

are working on new cases that have appeared

on the Treasury Solicitor's unclaimed estates list.

Today, I'm looking at the estate of David Arthur John Rixon.

It appears that David had been living with his only brother,

Gordon, until Gordon passed away in 2012.

Neither of them appear to have married or had children,

so there's no close kin involved.

What I'm trying to do now is to take a look

at who David's parents were and go straight into

maternal and paternal families.

They need to build a family tree and hopefully find living relatives.

Could you ask your rep to go to this address

and make some door-to-door enquiries?

Rixon is a surname that you don't come across too often.

It's neither rare nor common.

David Arthur John Rixon died on 5th September 2015,

a month after his 80th birthday.

He was a retired printer and lived in West London.

He was a reclusive character and none of his neighbours knew him

but did say he adored dogs - they were the love of his life.

The biggest part of someone's inheritance is normally their home

but heir hunters often don't know the value

when they take on the case.

I haven't valued this one yet

but it looks as though David and his brother, Gordon,

owned probably the family home together, it was probably inherited

and so it should be a sizeable estate.

On any single BV case that we work, we never know

what the value of the estate is.

We estimate that the estate value may be X or Y amount,

but really the only way we ever find out is when the solicitors begin

the administration of the estate.

In the office, Amy has located David's parents

from his birth certificate.

He was the son of Leonard Rixon and Claudine Lillian Kevan,

or 'Kevin'.

So, they're quite good names to work with.

David's father, Leonard Rixon, died when he was just 40 years old

and when David was only 13.

His mother, Claudine Kevan, didn't marry again,

so would have brought up David and his younger brother, Gordon,

as a single mother - a rarity in the '50s.

-Ooh, that's good news.

-SHE SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY

While Amy gets to grips with the family,

Ryan is working on another of the Treasury Solicitor's cases

that came in today.

By taking on multiple cases, they increase the chances

of finding heirs, but Amy doesn't have much time to help him.

I just need to try and figure out whether he has any children.

-Oh, is he married?

-I'm not sure.

SHE CHUCKLES

-Great start(!)

-It's just there's one which looks like I need

to rule it out before steaming ahead.

-Have you taken a look...see how big it is?

-Not yet.

Amy has been using a genealogist's most valuable tool

to research David Rixon's father's side of the family tree -

the census.

And I've located the paternal grandparents on the 1911 census

and I've established that there are probably five paternal stems

to look into.

The census revealed that William Charles Rixon

and Emily Sarah Harris had five children,

including David's father, Leonard.

Amy's challenge is to see which of these aunts and uncles

and their children may be alive and could be beneficiaries.

Ryan's case is developing quickly.

He thinks the search for potential heirs could be swift.

The deceased was married,

he lived with his mother by the looks of it for quite a long time

since the early 1980s but there is a possible marriage in Surrey,

which is the area that I've had to restrict the searches to.

There is two children to the marriage.

We could be looking at two potential children to the deceased,

we need to speak to one of them.

He's engaged.

The first brother that I tried is on the phone.

If Ryan has cracked his case that quickly, so will other firms.

On the Rixon investigation, Amy has had success in tracking down

some of David's aunts and uncles on his father's side.

-I'll give you the rest of the tree when....

-Sure.

So far I've looked at the stem of Albert Rixon.

He married a lady called Katherine and had two children -

June, who would be a paternal cousin.

I'm having trouble finding either an address or a death for her.

She had a brother, Brian, but he passed away in infancy.

So far, I haven't located any actual heirs

and the research is a little bit trickier than I thought it would be.

The names involved are still good, the family itself aren't...

..particularly easy to find.

While Amy is still struggling with David Rixon's case,

Ryan has found the heirs on the other case

and it all hangs on this call.

Hello there, we're a firm of heir hunters.

Look... No, it's in relation to an inheritance matter.

Hello?

OK. Well, that does happen sometimes. She's not interested.

I know we're ahead of the competition,

so I'm going to have to try again.

One of the main problems we face when we try to contact

potential beneficiaries is a fear people have of receiving a scam call

or a cold call and that's something that we learn to deal with,

with experience.

You know, sometimes we do have the phone put down on us

and that's something we have to deal with,

but if we get the chance to have more than a few minute conversation

with someone, quite often we're able to confirm the validity

of the reason that we're ringing.

I'm not trying to sell anything, it's in relation to your family tree

and a relative who's passed away.

Right.

OK. OK, thank you, bye-bye.

OK. So, she knows that it's in relation to someone

who's passed away.

She said she's not interested and she's very busy.

So...

It's quite frustrating.

Ryan can do no more and abandons the case.

It turns out that the estate had already been looked into

by another company prior to it being advertised,

so the good thing is we didn't get too, too far with our work.

With Ryan's work finished, he now joins forces with Amy

and looks into David Rixon's maternal side.

-Shall we take one each?

-Yeah, I'll give you...

This is the maternal census.

The 1911 census shows that David Rixon's maternal grandparents

were Donald Thomas Kevan and Florence Mabel Bunney.

They married in 1900 and lived in Stoke Newington, London...

..where Florence was employed as a dressmaker.

At the start of the 20th century,

dressmaking was an incredibly popular profession

for women, it was predominantly a women's profession.

As young girls, sewing formed part of the school curriculum

and so it was a skill that many women had

and then when they went to work in the industry

they tended to start at the bottom serving a three-year apprenticeship

and then working their way up through the industry,

some going on to becoming proprietresses

of their own business.

Whereas men's clothes were mass-produced,

certainly from the 19th century,

because of the complexity of fit of women's fashionable clothing,

it tended to be made on a much smaller scale

and often it was bespoke for the individual woman,

so it required a perfect body-moulding fit.

It's not known how long Florence was a dressmaker for

but by the time of the next census in 1911,

she's no longer listed as working.

A lot of women stopped working when they got married,

or certainly when they had children.

There was a social expectation that if your husband could afford

to keep the family, you didn't work.

Florence had four children

and the team now turn their attention to them.

-SHE SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY

-OK.

-You've got one, two, three.

-OK.

-You can pick.

-I'm picking that one.

Marcelle and maiden name Bunney. Yeah, looks good, I'll take that.

Oh, could you actually double-check that I checked

because she adds an E to Bunney sometimes.

-Yeah, shall I just check the variations?

-Yeah, please.

Another researcher joins the team.

Suzanne, who takes on one of David Rixon's uncles.

So, I'm looking at a maternal stem of Archibald Edward Kevan

or 'Keevan.'

The key question - are any of his children alive?

It looks as though there's quite a few births in the London area

where he was born and where he married.

So, I'm just having a look at that now.

Ryan next tackles David's maternal aunt, Marcelle Kevan...

Bye-bye.

..but can't find any children after her marriage.

That was easy, no-one dies out for Marcelle.

I didn't see any other issue as well with the variations of Bunney.

Amy is still plugging away at the paternal side

but it doesn't look hopeful.

Is there any other lines to do?

Why, have you... Has it all died down?

I'm leaving that one with Suzanne.

You can try and find June, I can't find her.

Her parents end up in Norwich but they're originally from Essex.

-I would start again.

-Start afresh? OK.

-Yeah.

So far, the research has not turned up any good leads

to living relatives.

It looks as though most of that side of the family

has completely died out now.

Suzanne is just checking one final stem.

So, Ryan has now come back to help me finish up with the paternal tree.

The paternal cousin, June, that I was looking for and couldn't find,

Ryan's actually found a spinster death for her.

-OK.

-Rosalie, that's them.

Why did I miss that?

I don't know but I didn't want to say anything.

SHE LAUGHS

It's not looking like a good day for the research team.

The Rixons actually seem to be quite difficult to find,

they're keeping themselves well-hidden.

So far, the team have found no heirs on either the maternal

or paternal side.

Is this case one that they won't be able to crack?

Every year in Britain, there are thousands of unsolved

inheritance cases where heirs need to be found.

Could you be one of them?

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 Zofia Zuk, who died on the 15th September 2002

in Newton Abbot, Devon.

She was born over 100 years ago in Debno, Poland, on the 15th May 1915

and lived to be 87.

Her maiden name was Zielinska and she was married to Waclaw Zuk.

Zofia is believed to have had two sisters,

her mother was Franciszka and her father was a farmer.

Next, the case of Mohammed Yunas, who was born in Pakistan

on New Year's Day, 1934.

He died in Eye, Suffolk, aged 76, on the 22nd December 2010.

Mohammed came to the UK in 1947, working for a military family

and continued with them till he retired.

Do either of these names strike a chord with you?

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.

If so, you could have thousands of pounds coming your way.

The heir hunters at Fraser and Fraser in London

have been investigating the case of Patricia Hall,

who died in January 2015 in north London.

So, let's recap then, just hand me that list.

With her estate estimated at just under £500,000,

they had to act quickly -

tracing family members before other firms beat them to it.

-Only one way to find out.

-Give it a call.

-Yeah.

So, when we had established that there were five heirs

on the paternal side, we then had to look into the maternal family.

Edith Rose Kerridge was the name that we had to look into.

The deceased mother was born in 1900 in Kensington.

We found her on the 1901 census

but couldn't find any records for her parents.

We knew who they were, they were George Isaac John Kerridge

and Elizabeth Louisa Kerridge.

The problem was is that Kerridge is spelt two ways,

one way is spelling it with a D and the other is spelling with an A.

They managed to find the right one - Patricia's grandparents,

George Kerridge and Elizabeth Morrill

were married in 1893

and nine months later, a wedding baby was born, George Jr.

They went on to have seven further children,

including Patricia's mother, Edith.

With so many children, there were potentially even more heirs to find

on this side of the family.

It's quite common for large families,

the further back you go, the larger the families tended to be

and you often come across cases where there's ten, 11, 12 children.

All of those stems need to be worked out,

we need to find out what happened to all the heirs.

As they looked into the aunts and uncles,

they discovered a death peculiar to the 1920s.

Looking at the family, we found that one of the siblings of Edith,

her sister, Eliza, died in quite a horrific way.

Looking at her death certificate I have here,

she died at the age of 22 of,

"Shock and extensive burns to the body

"after her clothing caught fire in the kitchen."

It was ruled an accidental death but...

..at 22, it's quite a waste of a life

and quite a horrific way to die, to be honest.

Next was William Francis Kerridge, born in 1896 in Kensington.

He later married a Violet Elsie Fisher in 1921.

They went on to have two children.

The youngest son, George Kerridge, actually passed away in 1949

of tuberculosis, which was quite common back then,

quite a killer for young people.

Their other son was William Kerridge Jr,

who was 16 when World War II broke out.

William Arthur Kerridge married Catherine Fitzgerald

in September 1949, in Hendon.

From his marriage certificate, we know that he was an aircraft fitter.

William worked during the war for an aircraft manufacturer

that pioneered the making of bombers.

I suspect that when war broke out, William was already an apprentice.

He'd probably have left school at 14,

so he was probably three years into his apprenticeship at Handley Page

and that's probably the reason why,

with all those skills already acquired,

they were not going to have him go off to war.

He might have preferred to go off and fight

but that wouldn't actually have been an option for him.

His skills would have been seen as far too important

to lose in wartime.

William would have done skilled supervisory work

with accelerated responsibilities due to the pressing needs

of the war.

Due to the demand for planes, he would've worked 12 hours a day

often on one of the most notable bombers of the war effort.

Handley Page are particularly known for producing the Halifax,

which is both a bomber and a transport plane and at times,

an ambulance plane.

There were over 6,000 of them produced and in operation

during the war.

Nearly 300,000 tonnes of bombs were delivered onto Germany

by the Halifax and very much part of the British war effort.

The loss from planes in the air was absolutely huge.

When they were bombing, for instance, over Germany,

about a third of the planes would be lost.

So, production was absolutely huge in that.

Because the government was keen to prevent the enemy

knowing the location of production sites,

William may have worked even longer shifts guarding the site.

There was always the danger that the factory itself

would be a target for bombing and that was a worry for people

and there was such a need for people at night,

maybe after he had done his ten or 12 hours work in the factory,

he would have been expected to be a night firefighter

looking out to see if there were, you know, bombers coming over

and prevent the factory actually being bombed

and stopping its production.

The heir hunters search showed that after the war,

William and his wife went on to have three children,

two of whom are living heirs.

One of their grandchildren, also an heir,

is Sasha Kerriage, who lives in Daventry.

At first I thought it was a little bit,

"Oh, is this a genuine phone call

"or is it somebody trying to catch me out?"

But we had a good chat on the phone and it was actually quite a surprise

to think that I'd had a relative that I'd never even heard of before

and I was actually quite excited to find out more.

My father never told me much about his side of the family

and I think that might be due to my father and my mother being separated

and us not seeing him very often.

The chance to inherit unexpectedly is welcome news.

Knowing that we've got a sum of money coming

certainly will help us out.

There's a few things that we'd like to do with it.

We don't get to go on fancy holidays very much, they can be quite pricey,

so we're perhaps looking at going on a family holiday.

So, yeah, just sort of spoiling my little family.

The inheritance offers Sasha more than just a financial reward,

it gives her the chance to find out more about her extended family.

I've travelled down to north London today

to come and meet one of Patricia's neighbours and friends.

Find a little bit more about where she lived

and I'm actually quite surprised to realise that it's so close

to where my existing family live just round the corner.

It's really strange to think that she was so close

and we never really knew.

Patricia's semidetached home now has new owners.

Sasha can see beyond the bricks and mortar.

This was Patricia's house, that's amazing.

It's a really weird feeling to think that she lived here all of her life

and what secrets that house would hold and what memories,

it's really exciting to look at.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-Hello, you must be Sasha.

-Hi. Yes. Vicky?

-Nice to meet you.

-Yes, thank you.

-Come in.

What can you tell me about Patricia?

-I'd just love to know a little bit more about her.

-Yeah.

-She was a very, very private person.

-Right, OK.

-She was friendly but she didn't get too friendly, you know?

-No.

And she lived with her parents and I remember when she was younger,

in her 20s and 30s, they used to go to the cinema every Friday night,

-the three of them - the mum and dad and Patricia.

-She never married?

-She never married, no.

-OK.

-I'd never known her have a boyfriend...

-Oh, right.

..until she was quite late in life

and she became very friendly with a chap called Tom.

-I think they used to work together.

-Oh, right, OK.

But then he died and she was quite, you know, quite upset about that.

I can imagine, yeah.

She would have loved to have known all this family, wouldn't she?

I think she would have done, yeah.

-Cos I think she felt quite lonely at the end of her life.

-Yeah.

All the years that I knew her, I never went into her house,

-she was that private, you know?

-OK, yeah.

As I say, she was very friendly

and she would chat if I saw her at the gate, you know,

if I was going shopping or... I often saw her in Brent Cross

or on the bus to the shops.

Now that I know where she was and where we have been all this time...

-Yes.

-..it does make me feel a little bit sad that we didn't know sooner.

Yes, she had relatives much closer to her than she probably knew.

Than she knew, yeah.

Thank you so much for letting me know what you know.

It's been absolutely fascinating, it really is.

I'm just so glad that I can pass the memories,

-the few memories that I have got...

-Yeah.

-Thank you for everything and we'll be in contact.

-We'll be in touch.

-All right, then, take care, bye.

-Bye.

Meeting Vicky today was amazing.

It's made me quite excited about what I can find out next.

I think it's wonderful to be able to pass on

whatever I've learnt over the years

because knowledge goes when people go and if you pass it on,

it doesn't go, it just carries on.

The heir hunters went on to complete the search

with Patricia's other aunts and uncles and their descendants.

We have 19 heirs on the maternal side...

..which compared to the paternal side of only five, is a lot bigger.

In total, 24 of Patricia's living heirs were found.

The case of Patricia Hall was fascinating

and the estate in the end was worth 480,000.

I do miss Pat and she was one of the few people around

that remembered my family, she was a link with my past.

You cannot not think of Patricia and maybe what she's been through,

what her life entailed.

I definitely will be raising a glass of the fizz to Patricia.

Finders heir hunters are looking into the case of David Rixon,

a printer who passed away aged 85.

He was a bachelor and lived in London.

If you want to give her a call and see if she knows...

So far, they've discovered several aunts and uncles,

none of whom are alive, but they've reached a brick wall

trying to find any cousins,

so the search for any living heirs isn't looking positive.

So, I'll start with this, I think,

-and then if you can just figure out who he was.

-So, I'll start trying...

-Thanks.

-Amy has a breakthrough and discovers another uncle,

Harry Rixon, had a rather large family.

I have a potential paternal cousin.

There was a telephone number for him but the number just rings,

there's no machine, I can't leave a message.

So, I'm going to try and send a rep

just to make sure he is who I think he is

and hopefully ask some questions about the rest of the family tree.

Ideally, I'd like to speak to him first over the phone.

With the competitive nature, I need some information from somebody.

One of the firm's travelling researchers is on standby.

Phil James used to work as a policeman.

It's only ever a positive experience

unless you get that very odd occasion

when you are actually telling someone

that someone they are very close to has died,

but generally with this type of work

and people appearing on a Bona Vacantia list,

that doesn't often happen.

In the office, Amy puts in a call to one of David's uncle Harry Rixon's

grandchildren to see what she can find out.

Often, it's not just records that provide missing clues,

it's information given from family members.

Hello, am I speaking with a relative?

Oh, it's her partner? We're working on a Rixon family tree

and it looks as though his brothers and sisters,

and I believe he still has two uncles that are living,

would be entitled to part of this estate.

Thank you for your help, bye-bye.

She doesn't know too much about the family

and it sounds as though she's probably not in touch

with all of the brothers and sisters that we're looking for.

I do have some numbers for a couple of the other siblings

of this beneficiary, so I'll see if I can catch any of them.

The problem we've got is that they're prime working age,

so it's probably going to be hard to actually speak to many of them.

But another one of the grandchildren, who is one of six,

then calls Amy.

Oh, thank you for calling back.

Would you like me to return your call to save your phone bill?

Yeah, OK, I'll call you straight back. Bye-bye.

Hello.

David hasn't left a will,

his estate's now going to be split up amongst relatives.

So, amongst those it will be any Rixon relatives that we can find.

Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.

This side of the family still haven't been contacted

by anybody else, so we're ahead of the competition, which is good.

On David's mother's side of the family,

there are three aunts and uncles -

Archibald, Frederick and Marcelle Kevan.

Ryan discovers that Frederick has no children

and Archibald has three, two still alive.

But what's puzzling him is whether David's aunt, Marcelle,

has any children who could be beneficiaries.

He calls one of the cousins.

Hello, is that Patricia England?

So, we're researching the Kevan family tree

in relation to a relative of yours who's passed away.

Right, OK. Who had a son called Clifford?

Yeah. Marcelle? Oh, OK.

Oh, really? OK. Well, I might have to go back to that then

having said I've looked at it.

So, if you have any questions, otherwise we'll probably be with you

within a couple of hours anyway. OK, thanks very much.

Good phone call with one of the maternal cousins.

She's definitely entitled, she's confirmed some details

on the family tree, which her sister was unable to.

We're going to see her later on this afternoon.

She mentioned her father had a sister called Marcelle

and I was quite proud that I'd looked into that line

but she said that Marcelle had a son called Clifford

who I don't think I did find, so I'm going to have a look at that again.

Clifford Williams is the missing and only child of Marcelle Kevan.

Clifford took the surname of his mother's partner,

who Marcelle didn't marry.

The reason that we couldn't find Clifford Williams in the searches

we were undertaking on the Rixon case was simply because -

one, he was born illegitimately

but he wasn't even born using the mother's maiden name.

She'd actually changed her name via deed poll from Kevan to Williams

and there was actually no way we would have found that birth

unless someone else in the family had told us about it

or unless we'd received her death certificate back into the office.

Clifford Williams lives in Herne Bay, Kent.

He's married with two children and is one of David Rixon's heirs.

I would say David was a very good-looking man...

..and I was very surprised that he never married

because he was that good-looking but he never seemed to.

Clifford has fond memories of time spent with David

when he was younger.

We grew up more or less together, even though they lived in London

they used to spend their holidays with us in the summer

because we lived by the seaside and they used to love the seaside,

they came down every year.

Clifford wants to now find out more about his family tree.

What I had hoped to achieve with this would be a history of my family

because I know very little about the family

because when you're young, you just don't seem to ask the questions

and then in later life when everyone's gone, you know,

it's too late to ask.

Across the country,

Phil James is hotfooting it to Chesham, Buckinghamshire,

to meet Patricia England.

Ryan has learnt another heir hunting firm had spoken to her,

so time is of the essence.

The staff in the office have identified this lady

as a potential beneficiary, so if all goes well,

we should have a new client within the next half an hour.

Phil is close to Chesham but has somehow got lost.

This is a big problem with this job is driving on sat nav

cos you don't know where you are. It is an absolute pain in the neck.

Hemel Hempstead it looks like we're going to.

Oh, it's through here.

No, I've lost it now.

I've lost where I was supposed to be going there.

We're on the wrong road.

It should be here somewhere.

It's one of these ones here.

Phil finally makes his 3pm appointment,

arriving at the home of David's cousin Patricia England

and her husband.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-Hello. Mr England?

-Yes.

-Hi, Phil James.

-Come in.

Thanks very much indeed, thank you.

-OK, Patricia...

-Yeah.

-..I know you were contacted by lovely Amy.

-Mm-hm.

I need to just confirm a few things with you before we move on.

-The person who died...that person is David Arthur John Rixon...

-Mm-hm.

..and he was your cousin.

-Do you remember him at all?

-No, I don't remember him at all.

-Do you think you ever met him?

-No.

-No?

-And his mother was a lady called Claudine.

-Claudine, yeah...

-Do you remember her?

-..which was my dad's sister.

-That's it.

-There's your pack that I promised to give you.

-OK, fine, thank you.

Everything's signed, sealed there, so that's all good

and as far as we're concerned, we'll be in contact with you very shortly

-about what the next...

-What the next step is.

-..part of the process is going to be.

-Oh, I see, right.

OK, that's fine.

And for Patricia, learning she had a cousin

has come as a bit of a surprise.

Well, I was quite shocked actually, yeah.

I didn't know I had a cousin, what's the name...?

Er...what his name was, David Rixon.

The couple find it strange to be receiving a windfall

from someone they didn't know, but any money could come in useful.

-Have a nice holiday, I think.

-Yeah.

A nice holiday, we haven't had one for a few years.

That would be nice.

Where will we go?

-Er...

-Madeira was nice, wasn't it?

-Yeah, Madeira or...

We went to Madeira a few years back. Yeah, that would be nice.

-Or Cyprus and Malta.

-Or Cyprus, Malta, hm.

-Lovely to have met you.

-Thank you very much. OK, bye.

-Cheerio now.

Phil thinks it must be hard for long-lost relatives to digest

that they are suddenly going to inherit money out of the blue.

Almost like the beneficiaries feel almost guilty.

You do get a sense of, perhaps guilt's the wrong word,

but something akin to guilt that, "Oh, my goodness.

"We're inheriting money from someone we didn't even know

"and should we have been closer?"

That sort of thing to it.

Where, of course, it was never in their gift to be closer,

that's how life is.

At the end of the research into David Rixon,

the heir hunters are pleased they found several heirs

and can pass on what is entitled to them.

It looks likely that the estate may be in the region of around £400,000.

Now, given that there's only 11 beneficiaries to the estate,

then it's a nice feeling to think that hopefully

there's some life-changing sums of money due to the people

that we've been dealing with.

There was an inheritance.

We're not one for going on holidays.

We don't want for anything,

we'd just probably put it aside for our children

and hopefully do some good that way.

I can't believe this is happening, you know?

Amazing.

But there you go, there you are.

Life's full of surprises, isn't it?