Smith/Dennis Heir Hunters

Today, the pressure's on as one team search for heirs

to a high-value estate...

Bye-bye.

It's frustrating.

She's not at home so we can't determine

if we've got the right heir or not.

..and the estate of a man from Essex proves fiercely competitive...

We knew that every second,

every minute would count in terms of finding the beneficiaries before

anybody else.

..leaving a £250,000 estate hanging in the balance.

Obviously, we'd spent a day researching into a family

which were no longer entitled.

It's all in a day's work for the Heir Hunters.

As I'm sure you're aware,

his estate's now been referred to the Government Legal Department

on behalf of the Crown.

In the offices of Fraser and Fraser in Central London,

the team are working a major new case.

Oh, no.

Case manager Dave Slee...

I have one, two, three, four...

five children.

..along with research manager Isha Adams,

is desperately trying to find heirs

to an estate thought to be worth around £140,000.

The case of Edith Florence Smith.

She died October this year, in Leicester.

In Britain, almost 750,000 people share the surname Smith,

so the team know they'll have their work cut out.

I do not enjoy the challenge of a Smith search!

It'll be a complete nightmare to try and find him.

You're faced with numerous people

being born at the same time

in the same district with the same names.

Edith Florence Smith passed away

on the 7th of October, 2016, age 95.

She'd lived in this semidetached house in Leicester

since it was built in 1932,

having moved there with her parents when she was just 12 years old.

Her neighbour, Tom, still remembers the day he first met Edith.

Come on, Luce.

We got married and bought this place, moved in.

Edie was living next door.

She was a nice neighbour. Bit eccentric.

When we walked past the window,

you know, taking the dogs to the park,

she'd always... She'd always wave.

Although Edith was quite a private lady,

she was an active member of her local church,

where she played the piano for the choir.

She'd start playing church music.

She liked going to church.

She had no television.

Would never have one.

She liked the radio, liked classical music.

She liked playing the piano, which is still in the back room.

Tom never recalls Edith having any contact with family members,

but in her latter years,

he remembers she grew close to a gentleman called John.

They met in Littlewoods...

..every Saturday.

When they'd finished, they used to walk down Haymarket,

go into Argos,

and sit on their settees.

They idolised each other, absolutely...

I mean, she was in her... Nearly her 90s.

John was quite poorly.

He passed away a few years ago.

She was absolutely devastated.

She never forgot the man at all.

She said to me once, if she'd been younger,

she would have got married.

What children have we got there?

Although Edith owned the house,

worth an estimated £140,000,

she didn't leave a will.

Whilst many estates are advertised

by the Government's Legal Department,

this came from an unusual source.

A few days ago,

Dave received a phone call from a gentleman

who claimed he was a distant relative of Edith's.

Now, what was unusual was that

this gentleman said that he was related to

the lady, but he didn't know how.

Now, that is strange, in the first instance.

With a valuable property at stake,

the team got straight to work.

As well as establishing whether the man who'd called in was a relative,

they'd also need to search for any other heirs to the estate.

Caroline, that would make sense,

and Thomas.

Yep.

As with most cases, Dave began by searching for Edith's close family.

The gentleman referred to the deceased as a spinster.

Now, of course, we also made a search

just to make sure that, you know,

she hadn't married during her lifetime.

The team were quickly able to confirm that Edith hadn't married

and didn't have any children.

So Dave's next task was to see if she had any siblings.

We needed to obtain a copy of

Edith's birth certificate in 1920,

which led us then to find that

her parents had married in 1911.

So it was a big gap.

And to see if there's any children post-1911 to 1920

and, of course, any children after 1920

that would be siblings to the deceased.

Dave quickly established that Edith's parents,

Thomas Owen Smith and Florence Edith Cooke,

married in December 1911,

but only had the one daughter.

This was bad news for Dave.

Not only did it mean he'd now have to search the wider family

for heirs, it was clear Smith

wouldn't be the only difficult surname to research.

In this instance,

the deceased's mother maiden name was Cooke with an E but,

unfortunately, of course, families tend to drop the E or put the E on.

So what you're doing, in fact, is duplicating your research.

You're undertaking the research under Cooke with an E

and without the E.

With no easy place to start,

Dave and the team had bitten the bullet and begun work

on the Smith side of the family.

And they were given a head start,

because Dave's mystery caller had been able to give them a copy

of Edith's parents' marriage certificate.

The information in that marriage

gives us the mother's father's name -

ie the grandfather's name -

on the mother's side,

and the same on the father's side.

With this vital information,

Dave was able to work out that Edith's grandparents,

Thomas Smith and Elizabeth Owen,

married in Leicester in 1871.

And, as well as Edith's father, Thomas,

they had a further three children -

Sarah, George and Ellen.

Dave has recruited research manager Isha Adams

to help tackle the daunting search for Smiths...

Right, I think I've found it.

..and, today, she's focusing her attention

on Edith's uncle, George Smith.

So I have got a marriage...

..of a George Smith to a Emma Jinks.

So I've got the '11 census.

I've got four definite daughters of the marriage.

George's daughters - Florence, Ida, Alice and Winifred -

are all likely to have passed away.

So Isha needs to find out if they had any children who are still alive

and heirs to the estate.

And then I'll probably work Ida first,

cos she's got the better name.

She's born June 1903.

But, frustratingly, Ida died without having any children.

So, next, she turns her attention to Alice.

And Alice Elizabeth is born the 4th of July...

..1905.

She's 97 when she died.

Isha's hoping that, unlike her sister Ida,

Alice went on to have children.

I'm just going to check anyway.

It doesn't look like Alice had any children.

It's disappointing news.

And Isha soon discovers that the third sister, Winifred,

also died a spinster.

All hopes now rest with George's final daughter, Florence.

So I'm going to just look for Florence Edith,

born 1899,

dying in Leicester.

See if any come up.

From looking at the deaths,

there is a Florence Edith Pawley,

spelt P-A-W-L-E-Y.

She's born 14th of February, 1900.

Dies...

August 1984, Leicester.

So, hopefully, she has at least one

child that we can work with.

And Isha soon discovers that Florence married

and seems to have had a child.

So there's only one daughter off of this marriage.

But Isha has reason to be cautious.

It's a bit odd, because it's 18 years after the marriage

and there only seems to be one...

child.

But as Isha receives the birth certificate

for her suspected heir...

No, this is all wrong.

..the team face some bad news.

The indexes suggested that there was a child from this marriage,

but subsequent research has now eliminated that.

In fact, that's a stem that dies out.

With no heirs,

and absolutely no link to the man

who brought the case to their attention,

there is an awful lot to do before this case is cracked.

How's everything going on the Dennis side of the family?

Whenever the Government releases the Bona Vacantia list

of unclaimed estates, there's a flurry of activity

at heir hunting firms up and down the country.

It's always a bit exciting when the new Bona Vacantia list comes out for

that day. Obviously, we have no idea what's going to be on the list,

how many adverts will be there, how many high-value cases.

Generally, we have no idea what's coming.

So it can go from maybe 10, 20, 30, 40 cases

one day to just having one estate on the list the next day.

Case manager Ryan Gregory

at London-based firm Finders International

recently had a particularly busy day.

We knew straightaway this case was going to be highly competitive.

If there's only one advert on the list,

this obviously puts the pressure on.

And this estate was worth around £250,000,

but Ryan had no idea it would push

him and the team to the limit.

We knew that every second,

every minute would count in terms of finding the beneficiaries before

anybody else.

Edmund Arthur Dennis passed away on the 10th of November, 2015,

in Broomhill Hospital in Essex,

aged 85.

Edmund was born and bred in Essex and,

although he kept himself to himself,

he was befriended by neighbours Kathleen and Alan,

who knew him as Eddie.

Oh, Eddie was lovely.

He was just...

..a very private person - very private -

but he did like to have people to have a chat to.

And he was always a very pleasant - what's the word? -

equable sort of character,

and...

..quite approachable once you knew him.

Very little is known about Edmund's life,

but he did have one big passion that he shared with Kathleen and Alan.

He was very keen on gardening and, since I retired,

I was doing more of it myself,

so we used to chat quite a lot...

..about garden matters.

He used to give us little plants and shoots.

Whatever time of year it was,

he used to put the different flowers

in and looked after it really well.

He used to love his garden.

Edmund had always been a very active man but, unexpectedly,

his health took a sharp turn for the worse.

He suddenly developed...

..symptoms, shall we say, of lack of energy, which wasn't his thing.

He was always quite energetic for an 80-year-old and more.

Eddie died...

fairly suddenly.

It was very, very sad and fairly sudden and, to some extent,

unexpected, in the end, yes. Yes.

But despite living next door to Edmund for over 35 years,

his friends didn't know of any family.

Ever since we've been here - Alan's been here since the '70s -

he's never had any family, we never saw anyone.

No.

Yeah, it did get a bit bigger.

There's quite a lot of cousins!

Yeah, a lot of cousins, yeah.

Edmund hadn't left a will,

and it was down to the team

to try and find heirs to his high-value estate.

They began by trying to establish

if Edmund had ever married or had children.

Interestingly for us,

there's a Maud B Dennis

who appears to have lived at the address

until about 1989.

Maud could be someone that Edmund was married to.

If Maud was Edmund's wife,

it could give Ryan an early break

and the edge on his competitors.

But you can see straightaway, the top entry is a Maud Bessie Dennis,

who died in 1989 in the correct area of Essex.

But Ryan's excitement was short lived.

We can see from her date of birth, she was born in 1903.

Therefore, she would have been too old to be Edmund's spouse,

and more likely fitting in of the...

..scenario that she was Edmund's mother.

Further searches revealed that Edmund had been a bachelor

and hadn't had any children,

so the team needed to look to his wider family.

They decided to divide and conquer,

with researcher Camilla Price focusing on the maternal side

whilst case manager Ryan looked into Edmund's father's family.

We want to work via the quickest channel possible in order to just,

hopefully, get the quickest results.

Yeah, if there's anything we can use to narrow down the search,

it's obviously beneficial to us when we are racing against the clock.

With every firm up and down the country also

potentially searching for beneficiaries,

the team had to work fast.

With any case when...

..there's a new advert out that day,

we have to go as quickly as we can.

But working fast can have its disadvantages.

There's no time to wait for all of the certificates

to come into the office.

It's a tactic that carries risk.

It's really hard to know

that family tree is 100% correct until those certificates

are in the office and can confirm that you are dealing with

the right family and the right people.

It can be very hard to know that you are on the right track.

Camilla got straight on it, searching for Edmund's mother,

Maud Bessie Carlick, on the 1911 census.

We were able to see that Maud had two older brothers

called Edward and William.

Just had two stems to work with.

I took one.

Despite the heavy workload, within a matter of hours,

Camilla was storming ahead,

working the stems of Edmund's maternal aunts and uncles,

hoping to find Edmund's cousins or their descendants.

The ideal scenario for us when we're looking into any intestacy case

would be to be conducting the research,

to be getting results within the first hours of the research.

To then find people.

Hopefully, to have a phone number, we can speak to them

and arrange a visit.

And Camilla didn't disappoint.

Located a cousin, was able to speak to them,

and we got a representative out quite quickly.

Camilla was closing in on potential maternal heirs.

With the clock ticking, Ryan was making progress

on the paternal side

and had established that Edmund's grandparents,

Ebenezer John Dennis and Beatrice Jane Coulter,

had married in 1894.

But as he searched the Census records for Edmund's siblings...

..he ran into a problem.

So on the 1901 and 1911 census records,

Ebenezer is listed as a brewers employee.

But, then, when we ordered his marriage certificate

to Beatrice Jane Quilter,

we saw that his profession was actually down as a baker.

Had Ryan taken a wrong turn,

or had Ebenezer simply changed professions?

So Ebenezer Dennis was a baker in the 1890s,

right at the end of the Victorian period.

The Victorian era had seen a massive change in the baking industry.

Since as far back as the Roman times,

bread had been gracing dinner tables all over Britain.

By the Victorian age,

the average family of six would eat the equivalent

of 31 loaves of bread each week.

So it's no wonder the local baker was at the heart of

every rural community.

This is indicative what a bakery in a small working town

in a rural part of the country

would have looked like around 1890.

So, by then, bread production was still mostly done by hand

by a team of staff of three or four people,

and manually kneading the dough in a dough trough

like we have beneath the counter.

As a baker in the late 1800s,

Ebenezer would have been providing a vital service for the

local community. But all that was about to change

as the Industrial Revolution swept across England.

The population in England in general had doubled,

so they were forced into trying to compete with mass production,

and by doing it by hand,

it's pretty much impossible to keep up with demand.

As traditional bakers struggled,

larger, industrialised bakeries took over.

A bread machine working in a factory could produce 400 loaves of bread

from two 20st bags of flour

in under 40 minutes.

Man making dough manually in a dough trough would have to knead it for

an hour and a half, and could take up to six hours

to produce that amount of bread.

So the consequence of that meant that many small bakers

were put out of business.

Records suggest Ebenezer was working as a baker right in the middle of

these transitional times.

We know that Ebenezer Dennis

changed his profession from being a Victorian baker

to being a brewers labourer.

So it may have been as a result of industrialisation, the introduction

of machines that they could no longer compete against,

that they went out of business

and he had to seek alternative employment.

We could still, obviously, be letting them know

a bit about this section of the family tree.

After he switched professions from a baker to a brewer,

Ebenezer and his wife Beatrice had five children,

including Edmund's father, Arthur.

One of these children, James,

died in infancy, and another, Ronald, died as a bachelor.

There was good news on the line of Beatrice,

as she appeared to have married and had children.

But when they looked into the final sibling, Harry,

they hit another snag.

One main delaying factor for us

was the fact that the eldest born,

Harry John Dennis, actually emigrated to Australia.

He married in Australia.

They're not records we freely have access to here.

It was a frustrating setback.

But, across the office,

Camilla was making good progress on the maternal side

and had already located a number of potential heirs.

Within those few hours, competition were already catching up,

so we were trying to get visits out

very quickly and speak to people as soon as we could.

It was a triumphant result.

In just one day,

Camilla had signed up eight potential heirs

on the maternal side of the family.

We had already retained a couple of signatures from a few

beneficiaries and we were hopeful

that everything seemed to be going quite smoothly at that stage.

But Camilla's research was about to be derailed.

The next day, I spoke to a beneficiary.

She believed that she may not be part of the correct family

and that she may potentially be a half-blood cousin once removed.

At this stage, Ryan believed he'd found possible full blood heirs

on the paternal side,

so that meant any half-blood relatives would not be entitled.

Camilla now had to wait for certificates to come in

to see if the heirs she'd found were indeed half-blood.

After receiving her birth certificate in the office,

we realised that, even though Maud was registered as a Carlick,

she was actually an illegitimate birth.

Edmund's mother, Maud, was born after her father had died,

which meant he wasn't listed on the birth certificate.

It was disastrous news for the team.

We no longer had any full-blood maternal heirs,

and only half-bloods,

so this drastically changed our research

and meant that we now had no maternal side to our family.

It meant none of the heirs Camilla had signed would be entitled.

We could have spent an hour, a couple of hours,

potentially even a day working the wrong family,

and someone else might be working the right one.

All hopes of finding heirs to this £250,000 estate

now rested with the paternal side of the family.

But would the team be able to get there ahead of the competition?

Every year in Britain, thousands of people

get a surprise knock on the door from heir hunters.

I found that amazing,

that I had that side of the family

that I didn't know existed.

As well as handing over life-changing sums of money,

the heir hunters can bring long-lost relatives back together.

And I was quite shocked

because I didn't realise that there was anybody in the family that we

could inherit from any more.

But thousands of estates have eluded the heir hunters

and remain unsolved.

Today, we've got details of two estates yet to be claimed.

Could you be the person the heir hunters are looking for,

or know someone that is?

The first case is...

He was born in London on...

..and died in...

John was married, and it's thought he may have had a sister,

and may have also used the middle name of Edward.

Is there a chance you could be related, or know someone who is?

This second case is...

She was born in...

..and died on the...

..in...

Do you know a Goff or a Yalden?

If so, you could be in line for a surprise windfall.

At Fraser and Fraser in Central London...

We're getting further liabilities come to light and/or assets come to

light as well.

..heir hunters Dave and Isha are frantically

trying to find beneficiaries for the estate of Edith Smith

after being tipped off by a gentleman

who thinks he might be an heir.

So that's where it stands at the moment.

It's incredibly rare to receive a phone call like I did,

where the person who's phoned me,

believes they're related to the deceased,

but don't know to what degree they're related

or, indeed, to what side of the family they're related.

Edith didn't leave a will,

so the team have been trying to build a family tree

to try to find out if there's any truth in the caller's claims

and whether there were any other potential heirs

to Edith's £140,000 estate.

And he asked us if we could firstly

establish if he was, indeed, related, and to what degree.

PHONE RINGS

Hello?

Isha thought she'd found a potential heir

through one of Edith's paternal uncles,

but she discovered she'd been researching the wrong family.

It was just pure fluke that there were two families in the same area,

at the same time, with the same surnames, having children.

No, that's no good to you, to use that.

While Isha continues the search for Smith relatives,

Dave has been able to make some progress

on the maternal Cooke side of the family.

What we want to now establish -

are there other brothers and sisters to the deceased's mother

who would have descendants alive,

who would, of course, be entitled parties in this estate?

To do this, Dave has had to look into the maternal grandparents,

Benjamin Cooke and Mary Dovaston,

and search for their children.

And, immediately, something caught his eye.

Unusually, the father had this great profession -

he was a master hatter...

..based in Oxford Street in Leicester.

In the late 19th and early 20th century,

hats were at the peak of their popularity in England,

with hat manufacturing one of the busiest industries of the era.

Everyone wore a hat - man, woman and child.

You wouldn't leave the house without a hat.

But not just any old hat would do.

Your choice of headwear was governed by stringent rules.

The hat etiquette at this time was very strict.

What kind of hat you wore depended on your status and your role in

society. The foreman of a factory would wear one kind of hat,

whereas the workers would wear another.

Men like Edith's grandfather,

Benjamin Cooke, who made hats for a living,

were referred to as hatters.

Benjamin Cooke would have mainly been making silk top hats.

It was all done by hand in the time we're thinking about,

so you'd have to spend many years training to get it exactly right.

It was quite a lonely job, because you'd be in a room all by yourself.

It may have been hard work for very little pay,

but hatters did get some perks.

Bosses would insist on their staff drinking a large quantity of beer

each day, and for good reason.

Then the urine, at the end of the day, would be put into a bucket,

and then the urea from that would be used for the felting process with

wool. All the hatters would live along a road and, at the end of the

night, or in the morning, you'd leave your bucket of urine

outside and you'd get a penny for your bucket,

hence why there are so many Penny Lanes around the country.

However, there was one major drawback

to this fascinating profession.

Being a hatter was not a healthy occupation.

You were surrounded by toxic chemicals,

with the main toxicity being mercury.

Mercury poisoning gives you the shakes,

it makes you hallucinate,

and it makes you appear insane.

This is where the phrase "mad as a hatter" originated from.

And, eventually, it will kill you.

Not a very nice disease.

All right, thank you very much for your time.

Take care, bye-bye.

From looking at his death certificate,

it seems Benjamin died from another condition

linked to exposure to mercury.

Benjamin, the grandfather,

died when he was only 51 of cirrhosis of the liver.

The team had been trying to establish

how many children Benjamin had before his untimely death.

Now, the grandfather's deceased by 1906,

but the 1911 Census shows that she had five children.

In theory, four other aunts and uncles to the deceased

who could have descendants alive who could be entitled.

Dave established that,

after Benjamin Cooke married Mary Dovaston, they had

Edith's mother, Florence,

and four other children -

Caroline, Thomas, Arthur and Emily.

But after further research into these aunts and uncles,

things weren't looking good for the team.

Caroline, who was married to Mr Bates and died without any issue.

Thomas, who we believe was a casualty of the First World War.

Arthur Benjamin Cooke, who died a bachelor.

That means all hope of finding heirs on the maternal family and

establishing whether or not the mystery caller

is a long-lost relative rests with Edith's one remaining aunt.

Emily, the youngest, who was married to Mr Coleman,

and that's the only stem on the maternal family

that has a descendant alive.

So although we started off with four maternal aunts and uncles,

we've ended up with literally just one beneficiary

entitled on that side of the family.

Dave has managed to make contact with the sole maternal heir,

so it's a major breakthrough.

Things are also looking up on the Smith side of the family.

The team have established that there are several potential heirs from

Edith's aunt, Ellen,

which just leaves the stem of her other aunt, Sarah, to crack.

Fingers crossed she's at home and I can actually get to see her.

And, today, one of the firm's travelling researchers,

Ewart Lindsay, is on his way

to visit a lady they believe may be Sarah's granddaughter.

Yeah, I'm just about to go and see a cousin once removed

on this case of Smith.

I'll go and see if she's at home

and if I can get to speak to her...

..and go through the family with her, you know?

If the lady is in and can confirm she's an heir,

the team could be close to wrapping up this tricky case.

But it's not good news.

Unfortunately she's not at home,

still not home, so I've left her a letter...

..and hopefully she'll get back,

probably later on today or tomorrow.

In the office, Dave's got wind of the bad news.

This is typical of my luck - she's not at home,

so we can't determine if we've got the right heir or not.

A few days later, though,

Dave's made a breakthrough and managed to answer a key question -

whether the man who has referred the case to them is a relative or not.

So the first stem that we researched was the paternal aunt of the

deceased, Sarah Smith.

She had just one child, called Evelyn,

who was a first cousin to the deceased.

But it was one of her grandsons, Richard,

who had contacted Dave in the first place,

and was now confirmed as an heir.

I knew I was connected in a way,

but I didn't know whether I was bloodline,

or which side of the family I was connected.

I was traced to being a first cousin twice removed.

Richard had known of Edith since he was a little boy

and has fond memories of the times he spent with her

when he was growing up.

Well, I knew Edith, really, from an early age.

She used to go...

..to my grandma's on a Saturday afternoon.

She used to go from her home in Anstey

and always visit my grandma on a Saturday.

It was always pleasant, you know, and that sort of thing.

Liked her. She loved her tea. When you went round,

she always liked a cup of tea.

After Edith passed away,

Richard tried to help organise her affairs

and found this photo album in her house.

This first photo we've got in the album is of Edith.

I don't know how old - not very old - looking very...

Looking very cheerful and a good head of hair.

This has helped him fill in the blanks about his family history.

Edith sitting, it looks like, on holiday at the seaside,

sitting on the beach with my grandma.

Both smiling, enjoying themselves.

I'm not sure how old she'd be there,

but that's how we always remembered Edith.

She sort of looked like that from then on, until her latter years.

Richard will share Edith's £140,000 estate

with seven other heirs.

For Dave, having successfully found the right beneficiaries,

as well as solving the mystery of Richard's long-lost family,

it's certainly one phone call he's glad he took.

We were very fortunate to have Mr Tebbit phone us up directly.

And a lot of the times I take phone calls and those matters don't go

anywhere at all. So this is one of those few that come across my desk

which were really worth working.

I'm struggling to find contact details for this guy.

The team at Finders International

had been racing to find beneficiaries

for the £250,000 estate of Edmund Dennis,

who passed away in 2015.

We knew straightaway this case was going to be highly competitive.

Edmund didn't leave a will,

so his sizeable estate was advertised by the Government.

But as it was the only case published that day,

the team faced stiff competition from rival firms.

Immediately, from the offset, with only one case,

we were kind of up against it, in terms of competition.

The team had started finding potential heirs

on both sides of the family,

but they'd suffered a setback on the maternal side when they discovered

the eight heirs they'd found were half-blood cousins,

and therefore unlikely to be entitled.

When we find out that we've taken a wrong step,

we'll realise then that we're most likely behind.

We could have spent an hour, couple of hours,

potentially even a day working the wrong family,

and someone else might be working the right one.

We need to map it out. It's good that someone else told us.

To stay ahead of rival firms,

the team needed to work fast and complete their research

into the paternal side of the family.

And they were now focused on Edmund's aunt, Beatrice.

The main problem for us was that she married a Walter Frederick Johnson.

Despite the tricky surname,

Ryan was able to find some vital information about Beatrice.

Found out that Beatrice had seven children

in the years between 1917 and 1929.

For us, at this stage, we want to hopefully find one of these children

who are still alive. They'd be a cousin of the deceased

and a key port of information for us.

Using every resource at his disposal,

Ryan and the team successfully traced all seven children.

But, despite his best efforts, Ryan

was about to receive another setback.

What we found out, that all of the children of Beatrice actually had

passed away.

With a £250,000 estate at stake,

it's the last thing he wanted to hear.

So, again, we're dropping down another generation.

It's quite frantic for us to try and get to a beneficiary

before the competition.

The pressure was mounting.

It means that we are at the mercy

of how good...

..any other competitors' research is. How quick are they?

Do they have other resources?

Can you try and trace them through and speak to them, and find out

whether they're related or not?

Ryan and the team used every record they could find

to piece together Beatrice's family.

It is quite a big family -

seven children now have all passed away.

If each of those seven children had a number of children of their own,

you can see how quickly the tree gets bigger and bigger.

There were 24 - at least 24 - beneficiaries on the paternal side.

It was the breakthrough the team desperately needed.

With 24 potential heirs on the horizon,

Ryan knew their efforts were starting to pay off.

The paternal side, it was quite easy for us to get a lead in to the

paternal family. Everything was going well -

we had reps out to the beneficiaries.

But the team's excitement was short-lived.

As they made contact with the potential paternal heirs,

they got bad news...

..some of them had already been spoken to by rival firms.

I feel we could have had more luck on our side with this case.

We faced a bit of a delay by contacting people

who were no longer entitled on the maternal side of the family.

When it came to the paternal side of the family,

we were having a string of bad luck

with getting hold of people.

But Ryan wasn't giving up without a fight.

He knew any hopes of signing further beneficiaries rested with the

potentially tricky stem of Edmund's cousin, Eric.

We knew we were looking for an Eric H Johnson

who was born in 1920,

and we found out that Eric actually, unfortunately, passed away in 2005.

The thing which delayed the search for his descendants

was the fact that he'd moved from Essex to Kent.

It's a neighbouring county but, obviously, it threw up a lot more

possibilities, in terms of potential marriages.

Ryan was in luck and managed to find a marriage record for Eric

to a Daphne Ellis in 1944.

They had four children - one of them was Wayne,

who Ryan believed was Edmund's cousin once removed.

Was Ryan finally closing in on an heir?

I was quite surprised,

a little bit shocked,

to find out that I had a long-lost relative who's...

..passed on.

For Wayne, the news came like a bolt out of the blue.

And he'd never mentioned him.

He didn't say a lot, my father, about his family,

so it was a bit of a surprise,

as I'd never met him.

I'd never met the gentleman.

Wayne has spent much of his life working away at sea

in the Merchant Navy.

The first day I went to sea,

I remember was the day that President Kennedy died.

It's faded now...

This is when I started off -

the beginning of my career.

But his seafaring career didn't leave much time for family.

I lost all contact with them.

Travelling around the world, I never did meet many of them.

I wish that I-I...

..had kept in contact with them.

It would have been interesting to...

..see how they're getting along.

After a tough search with plenty of pressure from the competition,

the case had worked out well for Ryan and the team.

They'd signed up eight of Edmund's heirs

and were pleased with the result.

I guess when you speak to beneficiaries,

and they can confirm that you have

the right family and that everything is correct,

it makes everything so much more rewarding.

You can never really be too content with the research that you've done

until the case is at a stage where it's going to pay out, really.

There's so many different scenarios that could happen which could twist

the research on its head.

For heir Wayne, after years at sea,

he's now settled in the UK.

And discovering he's an heir has given him extra motivation

to find out more about his extended family...

It would be interesting to find out who my relative was,

to see what he had done with his life.

That would be interesting to find out.

..and not just the ones in the past.

Now that I'm retired, maybe I would have the chance now to...

..go up and visit them. I'd have to find out where they all live.

But...that won't be hard to do.