Wootton/Watson Heir Hunters

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

So this is what I've got so far.

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

The first case is riddled with unanswered questions.

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

-I didn't find one.

-OK.

And the second sees a transatlantic race to trace heirs.

Suddenly, this had become an international competition

that had moved from the west coast of the United States

to the northwest coast of England.

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

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

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

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

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

has travelled to Guernsey on the trail of the case

of retired clerk Joan Mary Wootton.

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

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

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

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

Leaving no will

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

or unclaimed estate list, Daniel has limited information regarding Joan's life.

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

The records for Guernsey are not online,

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

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

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

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

Daniel's on his way to meet Susan Illey,

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

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

It could be a long haul

to find any members of her family that could still be alive.

In London, senior case manager Ryan Gregory has also been

looking into the case.

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

I think there's only...

But with very limited research that can be done online

for records in Guernsey, he doesn't have much to go on.

But there have been enough clues to get the team going.

So I've got the advert from the Bona Vacantia list from the day that we opened the case.

Now, there was quite a bit more information there

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

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

surname rather than Wootton for any records going further back.

Ryan hoped that Joan's maiden name might provide clues to her

life story and lead to her heirs.

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

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

we're wondering, is this an hyphenated surname?

Where has the actual surname come from?

The initial government advert for Joan's next of kin to step forward

to claim her estate threw up some more interesting

details about her life.

I found out that she was living with a gentleman called Roland Wootton.

Now, using that information

and going onto the Marriage Index we have available in the office,

we could find their marriage and

we found out that Joan married under the surname Shearer.

With the heir hunters' search covering so much ground,

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

to learn about her early life.

And with three surnames listed for her,

there are already a lot of question marks.

Well, we've got to consider here that there could be an adoption maybe.

She's got a hyphenated name,

previous marriage...? Maybe she's even informally

used the name Shearer, so we'll have to work on this and see

whether there is any meaning behind this hyphenated surname

and unravel the whole mystery behind it.

So we'll have to get down to the record office and see if there's

a copy of Joan's birth certificate here that we can work on.

Guernsey's a tricky place to conduct research in,

mainly because they hold all their records separately to the rest of the UK

and none of their records are online.

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

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

Located here since the early 1800s,

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

and Susan has found Joan's birth record.

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

-Ah, OK.

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

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

-18.

-Number 18.

So now we can see her parents were Walter Le Tissier and Florence Lydia Quentin

and they lived at the north side, in the Vale

and her father's occupation was coal heaver.

With Joan's parents' names,

the next step is to find details about their marriage.

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

-OK.

..when Joan was born.

-Careful as you go.

-A rickety, rickety spiral staircase.

-So, what do we have here?

-This is the Marriage Index...

-Right.

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

This manual searching is like a treasure hunt.

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

marriage listing, Susan can quickly find their marriage certificate.

This will be the key to unlocking her past

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

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

-in the parish church at St Sampson.

-Right.

Water was 32 and Lydia 24.

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

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

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

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

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

may have come to a dead end,

but with Walter and Florence's marriage certificate found,

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

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

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

That is one of the few sections of information

we have available to us in the office.

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

Walter Le Tissier, was one of four children

and Joan's mother was actually one of five.

So we were researching as much as we could with

the information on the 1911 census for both the maternal

and paternal families, when Susan in Guernsey managed to get some

very important information over to us.

Susan had news which would lead them

one step closer to tracing Joan's heirs.

-I've found three siblings, all girls.

-Mm-hm.

-Sisters of Joan.

Here we are.

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

-OK.

-..in 1932.

-Same parents.

-Yep.

Daniel and Susan found Joan's second sister in another

record book upstairs.

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

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

So Walter and Florence Le Tissier had four daughters over a 14-year period.

Joan Mary was the eldest, followed by Doreen May, Ruby Rose and Valerie Maud.

With three siblings discovered, this could mean potential heirs

and Susan has homed in on one of them.

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

It's quite a Guernsey name and I do know several people with that surname.

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

-She was his auntie.

-Oh!

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

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

so that then allows you to do the contact.

-And they would be heirs to this...

-Potential beneficiaries, yes.

-OK.

The benefits of a small island have provided Ryan

back in London with his first invaluable lead in Joan Wootton's case.

So, with the information that Susan was able to provide us from her

research in Guernsey, we were actually able to make a contact,

initial contact with one of the family members

and the entitled heirs to the estate,

so they are one of the children of Ruby Roselle and really,

that was the key conversation to unlocking the rest of the case.

We found out that there was seven heirs in total,

five of whom were still living on the island of Guernsey.

The intricate pieces of the puzzle that made up Joan Wootton's life

were beginning to assemble.

But there was one vital piece of information still absent.

There was always a question that was making us a bit wary,

and that was, where exactly did the surname Shearer fit in?

Was there going to be an adoption that would make all our heirs

no longer entitled?

With the worry that all their hard work so far might have been in vain,

the team were keen to get to the bottom of the mysterious surname.

Those five years...

For children who went away as slightly older children,

it changed their lives.

Because they came back... Either they didn't come back, or they came back

and they didn't... Some of them didn't even recognise their family.

The length and breadth of the country,

heir hunters are turning detective, creating family trees

of people who have died with no next of kin and leaving no will...

KNOCK ON DOOR

..in a quest to track down heirs of their estate.

Hello?

The case of Susan Watson is a particularly sad and interesting one.

Susan was raised in the quiet village of Leasowe,

on the northern coast of the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire.

After graduating from Edinburgh University in 1973

with a first-class Honours degree in biological sciences,

Susan emigrated 5,000 miles away to Oakland in California,

where she worked as a biological scientist.

She had a real sense of fun and adventure,

was an intrepid traveller and a keen cyclist.

Tragedy struck when Susan was cycling home from the office,

just before Christmas 2013.

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

Susan was just 62 years old.

The dreadful accident was covered by a local news station.

Susan was doing everything right,

she was she obeying all the laws,

she was riding a bike, wearing a helmet, she probably had, like,

14 lights on her bike because... She was an amazing person.

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

by her friends in the Oakland cycling community.

But since she was British, her case came back across the pond

and was taken by Saul Marks, case manager at heir-hunting firm

Celtic Research.

This case came to us from an associate company

who we work with in the United States.

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

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

she didn't have any children of her own and they found her parents

and grandparents on the maternal side.

She had been living with a man in the United States, but they didn't appear to be married and as such,

he didn't appear to have a claim to her estate,

so it was up to us to go and find cousins who were

living in the UK or elsewhere who would be the rightful heirs.

We couldn't find a birth listing for the deceased,

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

but there's no birth listing,

it usually suggests that the person is adopted and we did

a search of the adoption register and sure enough, there she was.

And we obtained a copy of the adoption certificate

and it proved that she was the adopted daughter of Isabelle Davie and George William Watson.

Although Saul discovered that Susan had been adopted, the news didn't

change the heir hunter's job when searching for her beneficiaries.

After the Adoption of Children Act, which came into force in 1927,

everything changed for adopted children.

Well, what this means is, that once a person is formally adopted

after 1927, is that they gain all the legal

and inheritance rights of the family which they are adopted into.

Records revealed that Susan's father, George, passed away in 1966,

when Susan was in her mid-teens,

leaving her mother, Isabelle, to raise her on her own.

Isabelle never remarried and passed away in 1998.

So with no siblings or children for Susan,

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

All potentially her heirs.

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

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

This gave us their ages at marriage, which allowed us to find them

both in the 1911 census.

The census is invaluable for genealogists,

as it records each person living in a UK household

including their ages, jobs and relationships to one another.

The 1911 census showed us that Isabelle had an older brother

named Gordon Davie who was Susan's adoptive uncle.

So if he had any children, they would be heirs to the estate.

Sure enough, he had two children.

They were both alive, so we were really happy

that things were starting nicely.

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

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

It transpired that Gordon's two children,

who were Susan's first cousins,

had actually been approached by a rival firm of ours

here in the UK, which meant that our American associates

had obviously got rivals there who had referred it our rivals here.

So suddenly, this had become an international competition

that had moved from the west coast of the United States to the northwest coast of England.

Susan's two cousins were the only heirs

on her mother's side of the family.

So the race was now on for Saul to track down and secure any heirs

on her father's side, before his competitors got there first.

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

we went back to her parents' marriage certificate.

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

George William Watson had actually had two younger sisters.

And the parents of those people were Jane Watson and George Watson, a stonemason.

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

John Watson, was also a stonemason

and further research into census records between 1841 and 1871

uncovered that her father's two brothers were also in the trade.

In the 19th century, stone masonry often ran in families.

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

like, father and son would more than likely work together,

possibly even grandfather, father and son could have been a combination.

The Watson family would have done jobs such as work on buildings,

works on churches, memorials...

A master stonemason would have also done carving work as well

and would have been very well respected in his time.

The craft was a very skilled one

and would have taken many years to master.

He would have left school as early as 14

and gone straight into the family business and, yeah,

you would have done the very menial jobs and then they'd let you

on the tools to do very basic sort of jobs...

..to do with masonry.

And over the years, you get more familiar

and your skills would develop over time.

What a master stonemason will have done,

after his stone has been prepped by the apprentice,

all the detailed stuff. So, like, when you were carving flowers,

for instance, the form around the globe would have been removed,

ready for the master stonemason to go in and carve the flower.

The job was expert and creative, and definitely not easy.

We are now at a stage where it is getting a really good shape to it.

It won't be long until I get on to the decorative sort of phase

of this, but a bit more work to do on all the drapes.

I do think that being a stonemason back in 1880 would have been

a very difficult job, hard labour.

You would have calluses on your hands, definitely.

And it would have been hard graft.

Today, power tools make the physical part of the job easier, although

Simon still uses traditional tools in his artful work as a stonemason.

So the Watsons appeared to be a close-knit and hard-working family.

And the next step for Saul was to work his way up

Susan's father's family tree.

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

George, Susan's grandfather, married Jane Parsons

in Chester, in 1898.

They had three children.

Susan's father, George William, and his sisters, Olive Jean

and Queenie Elizabeth. All born in Peckforton, in Cheshire.

If Susan's aunts had had children,

this would potentially lead Saul to her heirs.

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

She married Arthur Green in 1922, in Nantwich.

And they went on to have six children.

She had her first child when she was just 20.

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

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

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

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

And she had three children, who we visited and they signed with us.

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

And he had quite a number of children, from whom there were

seven heirs, who, again, we were able to visit and write to and we signed.

Having had a bad start to this case, where the first two heirs who

we spoke to had actually been contacted by a rival firm,

it was a great relief for us to actually find heirs who hadn't been

contacted by the competition yet, and who were very willing to sign with us.

This change of fortune had led to ten heirs of Susan's estate,

but this was only the beginning.

Basically, it was a complete surprise,

because I didn't know of her existence...

..prior to the phone call.

Each year in Britain, thousands of people are taken by surprise

when they receive an unexpected visit 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 Government Legal Department's

unclaimed estates list.

The first case is Ernest Walker,

born on 15 March 1913 in London.

He died on 2 November 1992, aged 78, also in London.

Ernest's father, Ernest Jones,

worked as an electric bus driver in 1913.

Next, it's the case of Robert David Twigg.

He was born on 23 May 1943 in Selly Oak, Birmingham

and died on 24 January 2011, when he was 67 years old,

in Solihull, in the West Midlands.

On his birth certificate, he was named as Robert David Zweig,

but it is not known when his name was Anglicised.

If you think you may be related to either of these people, you would

need to make a claim on their estate via the Government Legal Department.

And if you ARE their next of kin,

you could have a windfall coming your way.

Heir hunters firm Finders in London are searching

for beneficiaries of the late Joan Wootton's estate.

She was born on the Channel Island of Guernsey in 1927,

and sadly passed away in Norfolk, aged 88, in 2015.

I will miss Joan terribly because I used to see her every single day.

And when I walk down the road, I miss her, you know,

miss going into her bungalow, because I did it every day.

And she was a really kind, lovely lady.

With extremely limited online records

available for the islanders, Daniel Curran has travelled

to Guernsey to meet researcher Susan Illey,

who has been looking into Joan's case.

So far, she's come up with some strong leads, which have given

Ryan in the office a springboard to create Joan's family tree.

But there's still a vital question unanswered.

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

-also known as Joan Le Tissier Shearer?

-We still had a massive question mark

over the surname Shearer.

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

we could be looking at completely the wrong family,

or there may have even been children from another marriage that we

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

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

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

It transpired that Joan had to tragically flee her home,

and her family.

As World War II engulfed Europe, German forces occupying France

set their sights on the Channel Islands.

And in 1940,

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

Joan was just 13 years old.

We understand that Joan was actually evacuated from Guernsey

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

In June 1940, a year into World War II, the Channel Islands became

the only British territories to be occupied by the Germans.

Almost half of Guernsey's population of 40,000 were evacuated to

England, Scotland and Wales.

They were mainly young children, some mothers and teachers.

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

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

I remember that very, very well, of course.

At the evacuation time, I can remember my mother being

so worried sick. We were crossed with the

so many people wanting to get away.

It was a really horrid time.

So we came back eventually, and my father said, "Well, we will stay."

He said, "If the Germans came, the Jerrys came, then I'm not moving

"for them. I was born in this house, and I'm staying in this house."

And he did.

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

We were farming, so we stayed as children here,

here in the occupation.

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

and urging their children to go.

Not long after the last boat taking evacuees to the

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

The Germans wrongly believed lorries laden with Guernsey tomatoes

ready for export were military vehicles,

and dropped their bombs, which killed 33 islanders

and injured 67 more.

We were terrified.

My mother just grabbed us and ran into the house opposite

where we lived, where they had a cellar.

We were just sat there, huddled up, just frightened.

-We could hear the noise, the shouts.

-With that bombing,

we knew an occupation was imminent.

And it was on Sunday, June 30, two days later, that the

Germans arrived here at the airport by plane.

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

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

and they were living side-by-side with German soldiers under fear,

-rations and curfews.

-Well, the Germans were everywhere.

They were in the streets, they were shopping,

they were taking most of our food.

And the Germans requisitioned properties.

You had 24 hours to move out and take whatever you had with you.

After Joan left, her family, too, had to leave their home.

Well, we know from the records, from the registration records,

that they were moved from where they were, St Sampson's,

to 8 Summerfield Road,

and that was obviously because the Germans needed St Pete...

St Sampson's harbour as their defensive harbour,

to bring in supplies.

Joan's sisters, Doreen and Ruby Rose,

were too young to be evacuated, and the sister she never knew,

Valerie, was born almost a year after she left.

For Joan's father, Walter,

life was tough looking after his family under German occupation.

He was only a humble coalman. He had to work very hard.

There was less of everything. Rations went down.

You had to improvise with substitute foods.

We used to use carrageen moss from the sea to make a sort of jelly.

Acorns to make coffee, parsnips to make tea.

The end of the war finally came in 1945.

It was a jubilant day for the islanders.

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

in front of Herm, just by the harbour.

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

as fast as we could.

And we got down to these 22 soldiers, marching,

bayonets, tin hats.

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

cried with them.

We just had to just love them and cuddle them,

and they were crying with us.

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

and the Queen and King visited the island.

But there are no records of Joan coming home.

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

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

and she would have perhaps have adopted parents,

where she was evacuated to, who looked after her,

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

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

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

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

It is possible that she took the name of the family that she

stayed with. I've seen that quite a few times.

OK, well, that's something we'll definitely have a look into, then.

And in the office in London, Ryan received a document which

seemed to confirm this.

One of the few certificates we were actually able to

order from the office, being an English record,

was actually Joan's marriage to Roland Leonard Wootton.

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

that Joan had listed her father as Francis Linden Shearer.

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

the Shearer name came from.

With just the information on the marriage certificate to go on,

it wasn't enough for us to say either way

whether Joan was actually just

fostered by Francis Linden Shearer, or whether she was fully adopted.

If we had found that the surname Shearer was relevant,

perhaps by an adoption, then it would have meant we would

have been looking at...

tracing members of the Shearer family.

And that, in turn, would mean that everything

we had done in Guernsey, all the family members

we had traced there, they would no longer be relevant to this intestacy.

Further information suggested that

although Joan did name Francis Shearer as her

father on her marriage certificate, there was no formal adoption, so her

seven blood relatives from Guernsey were still her beneficiaries.

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

Joan Wootton's niece, Kay Leslie,

daughter of her sister, Ruby Rose.

-Kay was born in 1960...

-Hi.

-Hello, Kay.

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

-So, your mother was Le Tissier at birth?

-Yes.

-OK.

I can remember my grandparents vaguely, her parents.

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

Kay may have distant memories of her grandparents,

her Aunt Joan's parents, and although she wasn't born when Guernsey was under

German occupation, she does have a knowledge of those turbulent years.

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

Those five years, for children who went away as slightly older

children, it changed their lives, because they came back.

Either they came back, or they came back and some of them

didn't even recognise their family after five years.

You know, growing up without any contact at all.

And I always thought that was really poignant.

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

-Mm.

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

-Exactly the same thing.

-I wouldn't judge Joan at all.

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

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

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

-Mm.

And to think that somebody who was such a close relative

had survived for a long period and had died only recently

and we didn't know about her.

This might be nice for you, actually,

we've got some photographs. This is from friends of Joan.

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

-as a young lady.

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

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

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

-She looks really like her.

-Definitely one of the family, then?

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

-Yeah.

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

My personal reaction to hearing that there was an aunt,

who I'd never known, was a sadness.

To think that, until fairly recently,

there was a direct relative, a close relative,

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

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

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

"any contact with her family in Guernsey?"

But, you know, life is complicated sometimes.

This case has been, certainly,

one of the more pleasant ones to deal with.

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

with the person they never knew about.

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

which is estimated at around £150,000.

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

All the neighbours all think of her very fondly.

She's got loads of friends in the village that, you know,

will miss her greatly.

To think that for 30-odd years there was someone

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

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

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

We were notified by our firm's

solicitors in Norfolk that they held a will.

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

divided between the RNLI and local youth centre.

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

won't actually stand to benefit, after all.

Although Jane Wootton's relatives

may no longer be entitled to her estate,

they have been given the gift of a missing piece

of their family history.

In Liverpool, heir hunting firm Celtic Research are overseeing

the case of biological scientist and avid cyclist Susan Watson.

Originally from Cheshire, Susan died in a tragic cycling accident

in her hometown of Oakland in California, in December 2013.

Susan passed away with no next of kin and she left no will.

She was an amazing person and lived brightly.

After learning that a rival firm had signed the sole two heirs

on Susan's mother's side of the family,

Saul Marks, the case manager, had worked round the clock to find

and sign up ten heirs on her father's side.

But it was still a race against time to stay one step ahead

of his competitors and trace more.

Susan's aunt, Olive Jean, her father's sister, had six children,

Susan's first cousins, four of whom had passed away.

But it was their children, her first cousins once removed,

along with her two surviving uncles, who would make up the majority

of her beneficiaries on her father's side.

On top of the ten heirs already signed up

were another nine on this branch of Joan's family tree.

One of her first cousins once removed is Angela Lang.

Her mother was Susan's first cousin, Molly.

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

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

an heir to Susan Watson's estate.

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

prior to the phone call.

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

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

and Molly Green, my mother,

because my father moved us away from the Cheshire area.

It is a very strange feeling to inherit from somebody

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

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

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

an extra holiday or something of that nature.

Now the history books have been opened for Angela, she's

travelled to the Cheshire village where her family hailed from.

And it's stirred up both emotions and memories.

My mother was brought up in Peckforton.

She was very, very attached to this place and used to visit frequently.

She had very close contacts,

which she kind of imbued on me a little.

Angela's come to Peckforton Castle, where her

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

helped carve and create this magnificent

architectural masterpiece.

It was commissioned by Lord John Tollemache, a landowner

and member of Parliament.

So he purchased this estate in 1840.

And in 1842 he set about building this castle.

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

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

-Mm, yes.

The architect Anthony Salvin, who designed the castle,

had a rather impressive CV.

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

Would you like to take a look inside the castle? And I can

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

-That would be lovely, thank you.

-Great.

The castle, built from red sandstone,

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

-So, welcome to the Great Hall.

-Right.

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

-Right.

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

-what a medieval great hall should look like.

-A baronial hall.

-Yeah.

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

-I must admit.

-Yeah.

Having seen the spectacular castle,

Angela's come to visit somewhere s little closer to home

in the village.

My mother was born here, the Elephant and Castle house,

-Peckforton.

-Yeah.

-And that's what on her birth certificate.

-Yeah.

The house gets its name from the carved statue of an elephant

with a castle on its back, which is currently sitting in the garden.

It dates back to around 1859

and the image originally formed part of a crest.

One of Angela's ancestors may have played a part in carving

the striking sculpture and her great-grandfather,

George Watson, was also thought to have lived in this cottage

at the turn of the 20th century.

That really is all I know,

that it is here and was here when my mother was a child here.

Well, maybe I can help you out with just a bit of information

-about the Elephant and Castle.

-Yeah.

-So, it was carved by George Watson's father, John Watson.

-Mm.

And this was actually in his garden, believe it or not.

He sculpted it and he had it on display and I think it was

meant as a bit of a showmanship, sort of, "Look what I can do."

So, it was removed from its original position, we think,

somewhere in the early, sort of, 1900s and was placed here.

I haven't been back here for 30 years, or thereabouts,

and it's lovely to come back, see that it hasn't changed.

-Thank you very much.

-No problem. Let's go and grab a coffee.

It's absolutely fascinating.

For Angela, who visit has been a worthwhile one.

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

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

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

maybe, I kind of wish she could have.

In Liverpool, Saul was at the final stages of tying up the Watson

family tree.

He'd now managed to trace and sign up 23 of Susan Watson's heirs.

His competitors had signed two, but one remained missing.

There was actually one of the paternal heirs who we were

unable to trace at all.

This gentleman had disappeared from the family fold a long time ago

and had, actually, been found to be living rough in his sister's

caravan in a field in North Wales in the 1980s.

So, for the time being, his share of the estate remains unclaimed,

but if he were to come forward, he would be entitled to claim it.

So, after an unpromising start to Susan Watson's case,

Saul had all the pieces in place to close the book on it.

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

the relevant paperwork to our attorney in California,

who could submit a claim to the relevant court.

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

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

It turns out that Susan

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

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

actually have a reasonably legitimate claim to this estate.

So, with an approximate value of around half a million pounds,

there are now 27 heirs who would inherit the estate between them,

now that Susan's partner had stepped forward.

There is a better the distinction in the legal term,

"common-law spouses,"

between the United Kingdom and some states in the United States.

Whereby, in the US, some states recognise common-law spouses

as having the same rights as if they were legally married.

And this stands in complete contrast with the United Kingdom.

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

And, for Angela,

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

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

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

Especially the way she died.

However, for me, it's been a chance to reconnect with this area,

with Peckforton, with my mother's family.

But it is bittersweet. It is bittersweet.