Forrest/Paget Heir Hunters

Today, the Heir Hunters reunite long-lost siblings...

They said, "We've found a great-niece."

And I thought... "I can't believe this."

..while uncovering a tragic secret.

All my life, I wanted to know about my mother.

I was 14 when he told me she was dead.

And a race to find one man's heirs

is stalled when Heir Hunters discover a nomadic family.

We hate working narrow-boatman estates,

simply and purely because they were just so transient.

It's a highly competitive business...

When you've got so many people to find,

you don't know if the competition's ahead of you, behind you...

..with millions of pounds waiting to be claimed.

Could the Heir Hunters be knocking at your door?

In Scotland, something amazing is about to happen.

We didn't know none of this.

Having travelled 9,000 miles from his home in Australia,

Ian Cunningham is about to meet his half-sister for the very first time.

I wish it had happened 30 years ago.

When we were a little bit more young and sprightly.

Until four months ago, Ian had no idea his half-sister existed.

I've never met Christine. Bit of a shock to the system.

This remarkable meeting of long-lost relatives

is thanks to the work of the Heir Hunters.

From time to time, we end up telling family members,

perhaps siblings or more distant relatives,

about family members that they weren't aware of.

It's quite nice to be able to bring people back together.

There's a few sad tales out there. I've been one of the lucky ones.

Forrest. Do you have the file?

The journey to today's reunion began in 2015,

when the estate of James Forrest was advertised

by the Queen and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer in Scotland.

It is essentially the Scottish version of the Treasury Solicitor.

They deal with unclaimed estates

and intestate estates in Scotland.

Although the team didn't know the value of the case,

they decided it was one they should work on.

We looked into this case regardless.

Because of the advertisement, this was going to be a competitive case,

whether or not value was known.

James Forrest died in 2014 in the town of Wishaw,

15 miles south-east of Glasgow.

This is the courtyard where James used to like to come out

and sit in the good weather. Liked all the plants.

James spent the final months of his life at the Beechwood Care Home.

No photographs of James appear to survive, but his carer,

Thomas Connell, remembers him as a friendly if quiet man.

He liked his horse racing and he had pictures of famous racehorses

all over his walls. He told me a while back he was a heavy gambler,

but he was down to the pound units and pound stakes.

I think he worked in Ravenscraig steelworks.

Blast furnace, I believe it was. Yeah. Blast furnace.

The Ravenscraig steelworks operated from 1962 until 1992,

when it was finally closed down.

During its peak, James would have been part of a team

handling just under one million tonnes of steel per year.

The closing of Ravenscraig steel mill

signalled the end of large-scale steel-making in Scotland.

I miss his character and I miss his conversations.

I just miss James for being James, that's it.

Although James had close friends,

there were no signs of any relatives.

I said, "Did you have a wife and that?" And he says, "No,

"I've no children. Didn't have a wife."

Back at the office, the search for heirs was under way.

This is the beneficiary we are hoping to get hold of.

Because the case had been released in Scotland,

Amy would be working with colleagues across the border.

We have an office based in Edinburgh that we can pass work to

when any Scottish research comes up

and they liaise with us here at the London office.

The team quickly confirmed that James was a bachelor

and had no children.

The next stage was to see if he had any siblings,

which meant they needed precious information about his parents.

The research we do in Scotland is made slightly easier

by the information available to us on the certificates there,

so a Scottish birth certificate will give you,

as well as the parents' names and the mother's maiden name,

it will also have the full date of the parents' marriage,

making it easier to narrow down an area and a family

that you're looking at.

This allowed the team to quickly establish that James's parents

were James Forrest and Annie Bell.

And it soon transpired that James had been their only son.

Once we've established that there are no immediate kin,

we then need to expand as quickly as possible

into how many maternal and paternal aunts and uncles there might be.

The team needed to establish who James's grandparents were

in order to trace potential aunts, uncles and cousins,

and their research took them back to the late 19th century.

So, we know that we can look through the 1881, 1891,

1901 and 1911 Scottish census returns.

Now, from those, we have details

about the maternal and the paternal family trees to get us going.

And on the maternal side,

it looked like they were going to have their work cut out,

as James's mother, Annie Bell,

was one of ten children born to George Bell and Jeannie Hamilton.

We knew that by 1911, we had two infant deaths,

also a two further children that passed away without having married

or having had any children of their own.

So, out of the ten total children,

we then had five additional stems to investigate.

But the team did have one thing on their side.

A Scottish death certificate would usually give you

the name of the deceased's parents,

which would help you to narrow down right away

onto a particular Bell family tree, for instance,

because you could search using particular keywords.

And that wasn't the only feature of the case

that was unique to Scotland.

On the paternal side,

the team has learned that James's grandfather

was also called James Forrest and had married an Isabella Girdwood.

With the way children and descendants are named

within a Scottish family, you will find a repeat of certain names.

So the names of James and Isabella will be repeated time and again,

and also, as the generations follow through,

you will notice that you pick up the surname of Forrest and Girdwood

again, particularly within the women of the family.

These traditions can sometimes help the Heir Hunters

make a vital breakthrough.

A prime example in the Forrest family tree is if we look at

the stem of paternal aunt Christina Forrest.

She married a John Moffat,

but her first-born daughter is Isabella Girdwood Moffat,

so she's been given the name of the paternal grandmother.

The team had now established that James's father had six siblings,

one of whom had died as an infant,

and they were also able to rule out one of his sisters,

who died a spinster.

So, the four remaining stems to look into were Christina,

John, Isabella

and Jane, who was also known as Jeannie.

One of James's and Isabella's daughters was Christina,

who'd married a John McKay Moffat.

They'd had one daughter, and in keeping with tradition,

she had been named Christina Forrest Moffat.

We searched into the stem of Christina Forrest Moffat,

identified pretty early on a marriage for her

to a gentleman named William Young.

From this, the team were able to search for possible births.

We are able to tell that she'd had at least one child,

a daughter named Christine.

And so the next obvious step would be to try and trace Christine

and try and speak to her.

A detailed search of records revealed that Christine

was alive and living near Glasgow.

The team believed she was an heir to James's estate

and got straight on the phone.

Oh, yes, that's me at school.

Oh, dear.

A long time ago!

For Christine, life was about to be turned upside down.

I think I said, "Are you sure you've got the right person here?"

I couldn't believe it.

I was more interested in the family.

Christine was brought up by her father, and life wasn't always easy.

I can't explain it. He was a horrible man.

He really was. Horrible individual.

He didn't know how to be nice.

Christine never met her mother and grew up knowing nothing about her.

All my life I wanted to know about my mother.

I was 14 when he told me she was dead.

But the Heir Hunters had discovered that it wasn't true.

From time to time, we will come across situations

where somebody within the family has lied about a scenario.

So, for instance, they've lied about a divorce,

by saying that the parent has passed away.

In fact, Christina Forrest Moffat had lived for another 26 years.

And it was down to Amy and the team to break this delicate news.

We've dealt with quite a number of shocking revelations here

and we have to be quite careful about any potential upset

that we might be causing.

Nonetheless, it was a huge shock for Christine.

She died in 1973.

So she was alive for quite a long time,

and I could have got to know her, and, of course, I didn't.

You know.

And it seems Christine's father went to great lengths

to keep the truth from her.

When I did go down to my grandmother's,

she didn't tell me she was alive.

But my father didn't want me going anywhere near,

because he probably realised I would find out

that my mother wasn't dead, at that time.

But as the Heir Hunters continued their research,

Christine was about to receive more shocking news.

Christina's eldest child, Christine, thought that she was an only child.

Her father had told her that her mother died when she was very young,

whereas in fact she had quite a number of brothers and sisters.

For Christine, it was the start of an astonishing journey

that would change her life forever.

I think it was quite wonderful to find out all these people,

all these relatives.

I have always thought that people don't make a will primarily

because it's an admission you're going to die.

In London, heir-hunting firm Fraser and Fraser have taken on

the high-value case of Frank Padgett,

a case that has proved a major test.

It's a cauldron. You know, you're working under pressure,

you've got lots of stems, you don't know how many,

it's a big jigsaw puzzle

and you're slowly putting all the pieces together. And it's fraught.

You know, it goes crazy.

Frank Padgett died in April 2016

in the town of Coalville, Leicestershire.

For many years, he worked as a gardener

and colleagues remember him as a quiet man.

He kept himself pretty much to himself.

Always fairly a smart dresser,

even though we were working in a manual situation.

He was quite dapper in his ways, Frank was.

Really professional in his job,

wanted to do the best job he could.

You know, he loved working outside.

And always had a laugh with Frank, a really good guy to work with.

His other habit was he'd whistle three bars of a tune,

and continue it all day, he could do.

Or sing a couple of lines of a verse.

He was a bit of a comic in that way.

I'm not sure that there was any special lady at all.

He was a bachelor through and through, to that degree.

Frank didn't leave a will,

so his estate was picked up by case manager Dave Slee.

Valued at £75,000,

Dave and the team made finding the heirs their top priority.

The Padgett estate,

we knew fairly early doors that Mr Padgett owned his own property,

so, of course, that means you can research the matter in the knowledge

that there's going to be some value to the estate.

With such a high-value estate,

the team knew that the case of Frank Padgett

would attract other heir-hunting firms.

The fact that there is likely to be competition

from a number of companies, I had to pull in virtually everyone

in the company to research the matter.

One of their first steps was to establish

some basic facts about Frank.

I started telephoning neighbours and friends

to try to build up a picture about Mr Padgett.

Dave's phone calls helped him to establish

that Frank had never married, nor had any children.

So the next step was to search the birth indexes

to find out who his parents were.

Padgett is the surname and in that...

One, two, three... There's about a dozen Padgetts

been born in that quarter.

And it shows in this column the mother's maiden name

of the child that is born and it's also Padgett,

and because Padgett's a fairly unusual name,

it's a fair indicator that that's an illegitimate birth.

Dave soon confirmed that Frank's mother was Betty Padgett.

She had been just 22 when Frank was born

and there was no father listed on his birth certificate.

The problem in identifying an illegitimate birth

is we lose some of our references.

All of a sudden, you are now taking out one side of the family.

There is no father. You can never prove who the father was.

There's no record on the birth.

So you're now limited to working just one family,

-the mother's family.

-It basically reduces the chances of us

finding a beneficiary by 50%.

So it is that much harder to do it and there's less family to find.

But another conversation with one of Frank's friends

would complicate matters further.

I got to speak to a person who was very friendly with Mr Padgett,

who was adamant that Mr Padgett had been adopted.

Having a legal adoption, we now have to look into the adopted family.

It's no longer from the biological mother.

And it's very, very important we discover this as early as possible.

But Dave was about to make another dramatic discovery.

Mr Padgett died as Frank Padgett, and was born as Frank Padgett.

So this must suggest that of course,

he was adopted by someone he was related to by blood anyway.

And Dave had a theory as to why that might be.

Many years ago, you would often find that if a young girl

had a child out of marriage,

that the child would often be taken in

by her parents as their own child.

There was only one way to find out if Dave's theory was right.

You need the adoption certificate to start with, because,

of course, you need to know who are the parties

that have adopted that child.

When the certificate came in,

they confirmed that Frank had indeed been adopted by the Padgett family.

But not quite as Dave had suspected.

What's unusual in the Padgett estate is that...

his mother allowed her uncle to adopt her child.

Now, this completely throws the whole equation on its head,

because all of a sudden, from a legal standpoint...

..Frank's mother, Betty, now becomes his first cousin.

On the 21st of July 1931,

one-month-old Frank was formally adopted by Betty's uncle,

Ernest Padgett, and his wife, Kate Williams.

And the search for heirs now looked very different.

Even though unusually he was adopted by a blood relative,

it changes the parameters of who is actually now going to be entitled.

This means that the team would still need to look for heirs

in the Padgett family,

but there was now a whole new branch to research.

Now, his adoptive mother, Kate Williams,

though not related by blood in any way to the deceased,

because he's now adopted into the family,

her family, the Williams, will also become entitled parties.

The common surname Williams

would be much harder to research than Padgett.

It was more bad news for the team.

Kate Williams, the adoptive mother of the deceased, her father,

Francis Wood Williams, an unusual combination,

he was actually a waterman.

Dave knew from experience that researching

the families of watermen could be a nightmare.

We hate working narrow-boatman estates,

purely and simply because they were just so transient.

And they're really difficult estates to work.

Obviously, they were like the lorry drivers of their era.

Francis Wood Williams and his family

were part of a vital 19th-century network

that allowed materials and freight to be transported around Britain.

Canals were built between 1760 and 1830.

They were the backbone of the nation

and the canals like the Grand Union Canal

in the Northampton area were the artery

for moving all the freights

north and south and east and west across the country.

But life for watermen wasn't easy.

We tend to think of a boatman

possibly as having a wonderful, outdoor existence.

But a report by the Registrar General noted that actually,

they had half the life expectancy of an agricultural worker.

Everything had to be done within a space

no more than about six feet square.

And their families were expected to work hard too.

Everyone was expected to play their part.

Whilst children these days might be playing outside

and having a good time, the children of that period

would be expected to pull their weight.

And of course, they didn't have regular schools to go to,

so a lot of them would have been illiterate.

But they would probably know the numbers and all the practical skills

required to run and look after a canal boat

and all the issues that went with delivering freight

from one place to another.

But the very nature of being watermen meant moving around.

Because they were transporting goods from one place to another

and they were on the boats right the way throughout the day,

they would actually live from day to day on the boats.

They may have been registered in one local parish

when they were born, but then they would be off, and tracking them down

I think would be a real challenge.

And the family's nomadic lifestyle was a major concern for Dave.

You're dictated to what area you're researching

by the areas that the deceased was born in or where the parents married

or where the brothers and sisters were born and married.

But with the family travelling up and down the waterways,

would Dave be able to trace relatives and crack the case?

Every year in Britain,

thousands of people get a surprise knock on the door

from the Heir Hunters.

-I was surprised.

-SHE LAUGHS

Very surprised.

A visit from the Heir Hunters can bring life-changing news.

So many questions unanswered.

Even though we've found out so much.

But there are still thousands of unsolved cases

where heirs need to be found.

Today, we've got the details of two estates

on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list that have yet to be claimed.

The first case is that of Alfred Kellsall,

who died a bachelor on the 10th of March 1992 in Uttoxeter,

Staffordshire, aged 84.

Kellsall is commonly spelt with one L, not two.

Do you recognise this unusual spelling?

Do you know someone related to Alfred Kellsall?

Could you be one of the heirs they are looking for?

The next case is that of Kathleen Minnie Wayte.

Kathleen was born on New Year's Day, 1905 in Nottingham.

She passed away on the 16th of June 1992, aged 87.

Wayte is an unusual name,

with fewer than 600 occurrences throughout the UK.

Do you know anything that could help solve the case

of Kathleen Minnie Wayte?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin?

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

-PHONE RINGS

-Hello?

In London, the team at Fraser and Fraser

were racing to find heirs to the £75,000 estate of Frank Padgett.

But the discovery of nomadic ancestors had halted their search.

The family all live on the narrow boat.

Mum has one child in Stafford and then the narrow boat,

nine months later, is in a completely different

part of the country, where she has another child.

Of course, that child has to be registered where it was born.

Frank Padgett died in Coalville, Leicestershire,

where he worked as a gardener for the local council.

Frank would be pruning these in the spring

and then later on in the autumn.

He loved his garden, his gardening. He loved his plants.

And his garden at home was just the same.

Absolutely immaculate.

And he kept everything pristine.

Just like he did himself.

But plants weren't Frank's only passion.

He was an avid season-ticket holder

at Leicester City at Filbert Street, as it was then.

Right through I think beyond his retirement,

he was still a Leicester supporter

and a regular attendee at home games at least.

And in his earlier years,

he probably used to travel quite a bit away as well.

The noise would have been developing as he arrived,

towards the bowl of the stadium.

He would've emerged into the light here

and the whole crowd and the whole pitch

would have unfolded before him.

Frank may not have married or had any children,

but on the terraces of his beloved club, he had another kind of family.

I'm sure that coming here every week,

Frank would have had a sense of camaraderie, a sense of belonging.

You're in a crowd of 32,000 and certainly,

when you do enter the ground and you feel the buzz

and you get the atmosphere and you hear the noise

and you see the colour and you talk to people around you

and you anticipate the game, you know, it is a wonderful feeling.

As a lifelong supporter, Frank saw his club through thick and thin.

When he first started coming down here in 1970,

they'd just been FA Cup finalists.

During the 1970s, they had a really entertaining side

with four England internationals playing for them.

During the 1980s,

he would have seen players like Gary Lineker and Alan Smith,

who both went on to score a lot of goals, not only for Leicester City,

but for England. And then, in the 1990s,

he would have seen Leicester City get to Wembley on seven occasions

in nine years.

And then, in the first decade of the 20th century,

it all started going a bit wrong, really.

They got into financial trouble, they went into administration,

the club didn't have any money,

they sort of went down on a downward decline.

But in April 2016, when Frank passed away,

Leicester City Football Club were well on their way

to one of the biggest sporting upsets of all time.

Leicester City went on this incredible run of winning seven

and drawing one of their last nine games,

which took them from seven points at the bottom to 14th in the table.

This run was then continued into the following season,

much to everybody's surprise.

Frank would have been aware of all of this.

They were top of the table for a significant part of the season and,

very sadly, he died in April, which was just, you know,

weeks - weeks! - away from Leicester winning

the only Premier League title

they've ever won in their whole 132-year history.

For the Heir Hunters, the search for Frank's heirs

was proving a real challenge.

Josh, have the certs come in?

They'd established that Frank had been adopted by his great-uncle,

Ernest Padgett, and his wife, Kate Williams,

and the team needed to trace their families to find heirs.

So the first thing I did was I kind of broke the team up.

One team worked the Padgett family

and one team now worked the adoptive mother's family,

the Williams family.

With competition from rival firms, it was tough staying ahead,

even with all hands on deck.

When you've got so many people to find,

you don't know if the competition is ahead of you, behind you.

Erm... Not easy.

The Williams side was looking especially difficult

as Dave had discovered Kate's father worked as a waterman

and was likely to have moved around.

So you could have brothers and sisters,

and I've had it in the past, eight or nine children,

literally all born in different parts of the country but,

if you put them all on together as a map,

it's the map of the waterways.

But a check of the 1911 census offered a glimmer of hope.

The father from an early age became a lock keeper

and therefore obviously was in one place and remained there,

so all the children would have been born probably from that one address.

We know that Francis Wood Williams became a lock keeper in 1906

and by that time, he was in his late 50s,

so he may have opted for a more gentle lifestyle.

Although it was still a very physical job.

Francis Wood Williams would have done a number of things

throughout the day. He could've been running water,

moving water from a higher level to a lower level.

If that lower level was getting a bit shallow,

he would put the windlass on here and then turn it round.

He would then come over here, put his hands on here,

and then push open the lock gate, open those gates, and away they go,

off to market. It wouldn't have been a life of leisure for him, because

pushing something weighing anything up to two tonnes

is really quite hard work.

But crucially for the team, lock keepers tended to stay in one place.

So it looks very much like Mr Williams has progressed

from years of working on the narrow boats

and on the waterways to probably he's got older

and now he's become a lock keeper,

entrenched in his little cottage,

opening and closing the locks all day.

Consequently, the fact that the family had settled in one place

now meant the team could forge ahead with the research.

On the mother's family, the Williams family, the deceased's mother,

Kate Williams, had six brothers and sisters.

But they were far from home and dry.

Williams is a common name

and there were more heirs on that side to trace.

They managed to establish that one of the siblings was Lily

and her daughter, Joan, had four children who were still alive.

Dave was hoping this was the pivotal breakthrough.

It is a jigsaw puzzle where you get the first piece

and then that family member will lead you on to the next one

and your research will then lead you on...

So you're just building up,

you know, this whole picture of the family tree.

Everything now rested on speaking to Joan's children, and Dave managed

to get a number for one of them.

I've phoned thousands of people in the course of the years

I've been in the business,

and I still get butterflies every time I phone someone.

'You're phoning people out of the blue.

'They don't know who you are and it's often that first 10-15 seconds

'that you've got to convince people'

that you're genuine and that this is a genuine matter.

All right. I'll speak to you later. Bye-bye now.

On the other end of the line,

Mervyn Hall was about to receive news of an unexpected inheritance.

The only person on that side of the family tree

that I knew of was my grandmother.

I didn't know she'd got a sister.

I didn't know anything about her parents and I certainly didn't know

that her sister had adopted Frank Padgett.

So that was all new to me and it caused me to contact other members

of the family that I hadn't spoken to for years.

We all started pooling information at that point,

but realised it was quite a mystery.

None of us knew about Frank Padgett at all.

It was the first we'd heard about it.

But Mervyn, an amateur genealogist,

knew plenty about his own branch of the family.

This is me here and this is my mother, Joan, Joan Boen, as was.

Her parents, James Boen and Lily Anne Williams.

Lily Anne Williams, my late grandmother, died young in 1938.

She was only 45 and that was quite a traumatic event for my mother.

I only have two photographs of her

and this one shows her holding her baby son, Clive, who's still alive.

He's my uncle.

It was her sister, Kate Williams, that adopted Frank Padgett.

Mervyn's research was invaluable to Dave and his team

as it helped them confirm

that the research they'd done into the Williams family was correct.

So here we have the Williams family.

Erm... Over 30 beneficiaries entitled.

On the paternal family, the Padgett family,

there are, I believe, 11 heirs.

So over 40 beneficiaries entitled to varying shares in the estate.

In total, the team had found 41 heirs,

and finding Mervyn meant that they'd beaten rival firms to the chase.

And only a few miles from where Frank Padgett lived and worked,

his distant relative, Mervyn,

has discovered a whole new side of his family.

Well, to me, Frank Padgett's still a bit of a mystery.

I think the very sad thing is that he lived out his final years

and he died without knowing that he had some relatives,

albeit distant ones, not very far away from him.

In London, a team of Heir Hunters were trying to find heirs

to the estate of James Forrest, who died in July 2014,

but the search was developing into a major task.

This one is a family with lots of children involved,

lots of maternal aunts and uncles,

and so you can imagine that they span across maybe 20 or 30 years

between the birth of the eldest and the birth of the youngest.

So, as you're coming down through the generations,

you can of course expect them to have children of their own

and children of THEIR own.

So you can imagine that the family trees very quickly expand

and you can be dealing with

potentially tens or even hundreds of beneficiaries.

But research into one branch of the family had also revealed

a heartbreaking secret that meant heir Christine

had never known her mother.

My dad told me my mother died when I was 14, which was a lie.

And, of course, I would never have forgiven him for that.

I think that was a horrible thing to do

because I never got to know her, you know.

I should have been able to get to know my mother.

But the revelations didn't stop there.

The team discovered that in 1953, Christina had a second marriage

to a man called Edward Donnelly in Birmingham.

Any children they'd had would be Christine's half-siblings

and heirs to James Forrest's estate.

We were able to make contact with the eldest child from that marriage,

Maureen, and she was able to confirm that her mother had three children

with her father, Edward Donnelly.

It was a big development for the team

and Maureen was the next person in the family

to be getting life-changing news.

We received a letter through the post

saying that a relative had died.

I didn't know who his name was,

although the name Forrest did ring a bell because it was my mum's name

before she was married.

But the biggest surprise for Maureen

was the news that she now had a half-sister, Christine.

They said, "We've found a great-niece."

So I said, "Who would the great-niece be?"

And she said, "Your mum's daughter."

So I looked and I thought... "I can't believe this."

Having settled in Birmingham and started her new family,

Christina had never spoken of her previous marriage

or the fact she'd had to leave behind another daughter.

I loved my mum, she was a good mum.

I just knew that whatever reason she had for doing it,

she'd done it for the right reason.

Going through life, she was always a quiet woman.

You always think she was worried about something

and somebody knocking on the door,

as if she was always looking for an answer,

and that's what I remember about my mum.

Now, though, Maureen had found out she had a half-sibling,

and in 2016, the sisters met for the first time.

We had a lovely day with them all.

That was that, that was the beginning of it for us.

And she explained everything and told us her life story

and we told her how we had been brought up as kids.

But there was to be one more dramatic revelation for the family.

Once we establish what the position is, we will let the family know.

Amy and the team discovered that before marrying Maureen's father,

Christina had settled down with a man called Robert Cunningham

and had two more children.

But sadly for Christina, it all went wrong.

Christina Roberts' relationship broke down and their youngest child

was put up for adoption when he was roughly three years old.

At that time, society took a very dim view of single mothers

and it's unlikely Christina had any choice over what happened next.

These were two brothers who were separated from the family

when their parents split up.

One of them was adopted out of the family, which isn't uncommon,

but the other boy was actually shipped overseas on a work scheme

to Australia, where he was put to work on farmland.

By today's standards, I think that would be unacceptable

and unimaginable.

After World War II,

over 3,000 UK children were sent to Australia as part of an agreement

between the two governments.

The children were aged between three and 14.

The Commonwealth Child Migration Scheme

was a scheme set up originally in this country

to sort of send over children that Britain just didn't want.

And up until 1967 there were over 150,000 children

that were sent over to different countries.

And it was thought by charitable organisations

that sending them to places within the Commonwealth

would give them a fresh start.

The children, when they got there,

they found themselves in institutions

and they also found themselves as servants for farmers

and working on things like roads and buildings.

One of the children sent out to Australia

was Christina's elder son, Ian Cunningham.

He was just five years old when he arrived and was taken

to a place called Fairbridge Farm.

They taught you to milk cows,

round up sheep and all this business.

That was 40 hours for ten shillings.

They said we were learning something

but I think they were earning something.

Ian was desperate to find out whether he had a family and, if so,

where they were.

I just thought, "Well, I'm here to survive," and...

..I noticed as I got five, six, seven other kids in my cottage

they were getting in touch with their mothers.

Their mothers would come and visit them

and I thought, "What's happened to mine?"

When he reached 16, Ian was able to leave Fairbridge

and he joined the Navy,

but the questions over who his mother was remained

until finally, in 2004, he was given the chance to get some answers.

Around 2000...

..this lady called Margaret Humphreys

came on the scene and she approached the British government

and they started putting funds into the Child Migration Centre

and things certainly snowballed from there.

A scheme called the Australian Migrant Trust

was set up to try and reunite people like Ian with their families.

Researchers from the scheme had managed to trace Ian's half-sister,

Maureen, and they began writing to each other.

"As I grew up I always felt there was something missing in my life.

"I went to bed at night and, like many other child migrants,

"stared into the darkness asking the same questions - who am I?

"Where was I born?

"Did I have an aunt or anybody?

"These were the nights when the tears rolled down my cheeks,

"but no-one ever saw them.

"After all, I was a Fairbridge boy.

"And Fairbridge boys go..."

-CRYING:

-I can't read this.

12 years ago, Ian and Maureen met in the UK for the first time

and started to repair the hurt from being separated.

Maureen was the first one to get in touch with me

in 2004, so three or four weeks later I arranged to fly.

And when he came, he was just an absolute nervous wreck, obviously.

He never knew anything about us and we were expecting him to come,

but there were sort of three of us and one of him and...

..it was just lovely to see him.

I found a family after being on my own for 40 years.

So, really supporting, so I'm very grateful for that.

But like Maureen, Ian was about to find out

he had another half-sibling.

He had heard from our research and from Maureen about

the elder sister Christine

that they had previously been unaware of and he asked us

to put him in touch with her.

I didn't know she existed...

for... What's that? 56 years.

Now, though, Ian has travelled to Scotland with Maureen

to meet Christine for the first time.

Her husband Gordon is driving them to the house

and Ian is worrying about what to say.

Can you suggest something?

THEY LAUGH

No, just go with the flow, just go with the flow.

Naturally if you don't meet someone after 30 or 40 years,

-Maureen, you're going to be nervous.

-I know.

Looking forward to seeing them, yeah.

And hoping we get on!

After 57 years of heartbreaking separation,

these siblings are about to meet for the first time.

-Hello.

-Hi there, I'm Chris and you're Ian.

-Ian, yeah.

-Lovely to meet you.

-Heard a lot about you.

-You look lovely.

-Oh, thank you very much.

Lovely to meet you.

It is.

-After how many...?

-How many years?

-Yeah.

-Good to see you.

-Yeah, you too.

Good to see all of you.

Well, we've all survived.

-Yeah, we have.

-That's the main thing.

-You look remarkably well.

That's lovely. Aw, thank you.

-There we go.

-Are these both for me?

-Of course.

-Aw, thank you so much.

That's lovely.

I'm so lucky, do you know that?

Because I've met up with all of you.

Ian and Christine can now begin the long process

of catching up with each other,

and with the only photograph of their mother that exists

they're looking for a family resemblance.

I sort of had that thick, cropped hair like Chrissie.

Maureen's is more thin.

It's pretty blurred as it is.

It came out of a locket, of course.

But the chance to be united with long-lost family

is the greatest gift of all.

Meeting all of you has helped enormously.

It's a wonderful thing for me.

For sure.

-That's why I flew over.

-I'm glad you did.

I'm glad you all did, because it's been wonderful.

In the office, after several weeks' work,

the team had managed to wrap up the search for James Forrest's heirs.

All in all, once our research was complete,

the estate of James Forrest had 35 beneficiaries.

But this is a case that has been about more than just tracing heirs.

It's quite nice to be able to bring people back together.

It's one of the more pleasing sides of the job.

It's a softer side and we're...

To me, it feels like we're giving something back.

And for Christine, Ian and Maureen,

it's the start of a new chapter in their lives.

If it hadn't been for the fact of this poor chap's story,

we would never have known we had a sister.

Well, I hope we both live to 100.

So I can see her some more.

It's just lovely to have a family.

I mean, I can't... I can't believe this.