Southall/Howard Heir Hunters

Today, the race is on to find heirs to a six-figure fortune.

So we literally need to find every single one?

A family's history reveals a tragic international love story.

They didn't have very much in common at all, apart from the child.

Different races, different classes.

Which has the power to surprise a new generation.

We had so many secrets in our families, and this was obviously,

I would imagine, one of the secrets.

Across the country, the hunt is on.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

We're going to have a look into this.

Hi there, I was just wondering whether you were free to do a visit for me this morning?

It's 2pm, and in London,

heir hunters Finders International have a fresh estate to work.

So, I've just had a new case in.

The information we've got is that it's the estate of

Eveline Ward Southall.

The team must find out as much as possible about Eveline

and her estate to establish if it's worth taking on.

We know that she's left approximately £100,000.

And the team always have to be aware of any competition

in the race to find heirs.

It's been referred to us by a firm of solicitors.

As Eveline's estate has been handed to them directly rather than being

advertised publicly, the team could be ahead of the game.

We would hope that they're not competitive,

but one of our competitors might get it from another source and so...

..as we progress, we might find that we've got some competition.

So case manager Suzanne gets to work

finding out as much as she can about Eveline.

We know that she was born on the 19th of October 1920,

and she passed away on the 15th of December 2015.

-Do you want any biscuits?

-Yes, please.

Eveline Southall lived the last years of her life

in a Birmingham care home.

Eveline was here for about two years.

She used to be very independent when she was here,...

-..trying to do everything for herself...

-And her hair, wasn't it?

Very much so, yeah.

She was very proud of her hair and liked to do her own hair.

And she was quite private,

she didn't really speak to us a lot about her family.

Or her past life. She only mentioned her husband a few times.

Eveline's husband, Sidney, had passed away in 2007.

But she said she missed her husband, Sidney, very much.

Take some biscuits, too.

But Eveline still enjoyed her time at the care home.

She was a very bubbly lady, always smiling.

She was just a generally nice person to talk to, wasn't she?

I'll leave it on the side there for you.

When Eveline passed away, it was discovered she'd left no will,

and didn't have any known close family.

So the hunt was on to find her heirs.

Could you look for this lady?

In the office, Suzanne has established

that Eveline and her husband never had children,

and she was an only child.

So this means we now have to look into

both the maternal and paternal side, to see if we can find some heirs.

Maybe get in contact with some cousins?

Suzanne needs help to work both sides of the family as quickly as

possible, and recruits researcher Ellie to get the hunt underway.

So, just got the certificates in,

which would help us out with this case, to get it going.

Suzanne knows Eveline's parents were Arthur Shaw and Marion Manning,

who married in Birmingham in 1919.

We've got a bit more information now,

-we can look at the census and start doing some research.

-OK.

The team find Arthur Shaw's parents,

Eveline's paternal grandparents,

George and Mary Shaw, on the 1911 census.

Living in Birmingham with Arthur and his siblings.

But there's a surprising twist when they study the census closer.

Now, it says that they ended up having 15 children in total.

It's a huge family.

Arthur Shaw had 14 brothers and sisters,

Eveline's paternal aunts and uncles.

So Suzanne will have her work cut out tracing every one of them.

Now, that's a huge, huge number,

so in terms of work, you think, you know,

it's going to be a really, really big case.

Suzanne will need all the help she can get

it if she is to find all the heirs,

and fellow case manager Ryan sees if he can lend a hand.

What are you up to with this one?

So, we've looked back at all the censuses.

So there's quite a few, there's 11 on this one,

so we sort of don't really know who's alive.

After early census records showed Eveline's father, Arthur,

having 14 siblings, Suzanne's now discovered that on the 1911 census,

the majority of them have vanished.

It's all happening in Birmingham, so basically you guys

-are looking into these lines?

-Yeah, at the moment.

With such a huge family and so many relatives missing,

the team are up against a difficult heir hunt,

and need to use every resource at their disposal.

OK, once we're into the top lines,

so in this case, the dad's brothers and sisters,

it should be relatively easy to figure out with the census.

The 1911 census is good

because it tells us how many children are in the family

and how many have passed away.

The 1911 census says seven out of Arthur's 14 siblings have died.

But, crucially, the census doesn't tell the team

which seven out of the 14 have passed away.

It's really, really tricky.

How are we going to figure out exactly who's who?

-I thought it would be quite an easy one.

-Hmm...

They'll now have to try and cross reference every available record

to see if they can work out which siblings have survived,

moved to a different household, or passed away.

There could be more living somewhere else.

In 1901. That's going to be the thing.

Do we ever have them all together?

That says 1891.

-Is this the most complete one?

-Yeah.

It's a numbers game, though, isn't it?

Everybody that's passed away is going to be as important as...

To figure it out.

Suzanne gets to work.

So, it is quite complicated, first of all, to get your head around it.

With all these names on each census.

Obviously, you have to sit down and go through and number them

to work out exactly what lines we need to work.

Suzanne does a detailed crosscheck of records.

So, we literally need to find every single one.

What I'm going to have to do for you is find possible deaths,

and then we'll have to order the deaths and just see who the informant is,

to find out if the parents are on there.

Ryan and Suzanne discover five of Arthur's siblings died as children,

and two died as adults without having children.

But it still leaves seven paternal aunts and uncles to trace -

a mammoth task.

So Suzanne gets the whole team involved

to track them and their families down.

-So, are you able to take a look for me at George?

-OK.

Ryan has a plan of attack.

So, Camilla, Suzanne and Holly, they're looking into the lines of the family

where we know the children survived to a time where they may or may not

have had kids, so they're going to be the easiest lines to work with.

It appears most of the family stay in one area,

which can help the team track the family down quicker.

-Well, as long as they all stay local, that's going to help.

-Yeah.

So what registration district is it?

Do you know? Is it all Birmingham M, Birmingham S?

-Or just Birmingham?

-He was born in Birmingham.

OK.

-They married in Birmingham. She was born in Birmingham.

-OK.

But as they look at each sibling of Eveline's father, Arthur Shaw,

they realise it's more difficult than they anticipated.

You just can't do a blanket birth search for Shaws.

There's just so many. The only problem is now,

-is just the number of Shaws there is, it's holding us back.

-Yeah.

The fact all the Shaws stayed in Birmingham turns out to be

a double-edged sword.

So, we're just having a look at the Shaw surname.

It's a lot more prevalent than I thought, personally,

so it's going to be tough, I think.

Suzanne's got her work cut out with the Shaw family.

It's turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

I didn't realise that Shaw was such a common name in Birmingham.

It's really a case of ordering certificates,

waiting for them to come in,

and then we can pick it back up.

To have to wait for those certificates,

we may have to wait 24 hours.

That can be incredibly frustrating.

Once you're involved in the research,

you really just got want to keep going and finalise it.

You want to reach the end result,

contact any heirs that might be there.

With the paternal family looking like a major headache,

Suzanne's only hope of finding heirs today

rests with the maternal Manning side of the family.

We're now just starting to look into the maternal side of the tree.

The paternal side has turned out to be

a lot more trickier than we first thought.

Eveline's mother was Ada Marion Manning,

and Suzanne has traced some of her siblings -

aunts and uncles of Eveline.

And we've managed to find them on the 1901 Census.

Um, however,

it looks like all the children are born across the country,

so there's some in Wales, some in Staffordshire,

-and...

-Some in Derby.

-Derbyshire.

So, again, I think it's going to be a lot trickier than

when we first sort of looked at the case initially.

The team have invested an entire day trying to find heirs

to Eveline Southall's estate

and they've struggle to make any meaningful progress.

But when they finally do contact a family member,

will it turn out their hard work has been for nothing?

-She's found wills?

-Yeah, I don't understand what she was saying.

In the course of their investigations,

heir hunters can come across cases which are completely unique.

Every day, it's different, and that's one of the things

which I think everyone involved in this industry love.

Their detective work into families' histories can uncover stories

which span decades and cross continents.

Any one estate could take you anywhere in the world,

and it often does.

Case manager Gareth Langford came across one such estate -

that of Edwin Howard from the government's Bona Vacantia list.

So the original information that we had

from the government legal department was pretty sparse.

We had date of death, date of birth and a place of birth,

being Fulham on this occasion.

Edwin died in June 2012 in west London, aged 97,

but sadly, no photos of him seem to survive.

With competition very likely on this case,

Gareth and the team quickly got to work

to see if Edwin had close relatives he'd lost touch with.

So we needed to see if the deceased was married, if he had any children.

It turned out, looking at the research, that we don't think

the deceased was married and certainly didn't have any children.

The next step was to look for wider family,

but first the team needed to make sure there would be some value

in the case and checked to see if Edwin had owned any property.

Records show that throughout the '80s and '90s,

Edwin lived at Sullivan Court in Fulham,

a major housing estate built shortly after the war.

There's plenty over there where the houses are, look.

Edward has lived there since the 1970s, and although he doesn't

remember Edwin, he's seen huge change in the area.

Fortunately, we've got a flat on the sixth floor,

which means that I look over all the other flats on the estate.

Everybody thought they were very lucky to come in Sullivan Court.

In the 1980s, residents like Edwin and Edward were given the chance

to purchase their properties

under Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme.

Edward bought his and it's proved a wise investment.

In 1990, it was valued at £71,000.

But now it's about £200,000, £300,000.

Some of them are still going now

and they're selling for £500,000, by the way.

HE LAUGHS

But the key question for the heir hunters was whether

Edward's neighbour Edwin had made an equally shrewd investment.

I just wanted to check with you two things.

They weren't sure, but they decided to take a punt anyway.

But it's enough for the competition

to be looking at it and there's always that thought

in the back of your mind when you're looking at any case,

is there going to be competition?

Gareth's next step was to find Edwin's parents and see if he had

any brothers or sisters.

With an estate that could be worth several hundred thousand pounds,

the team couldn't hang around.

But when they looked for a key piece of information, they were stumped.

So the first thing we need to do on any case that we look at

is find the birth certificate of the deceased.

It's the vital information that we need.

And in this particular case, that was our stumbling point.

We literally could not find the birth certificate of Edwin Howard.

It was a frustrating setback.

Without that, it's extremely difficult to even start the case.

Gareth needed more help, so called in experienced researcher Alan,

who looked at new ways of discovering the record of Edwin's birth.

I backtracked the address that the deceased had been living at

and those in the area through various sources that we have.

If you're looking at an estate with no birth certificate,

we have to trawl through the other records that are available for us.

Alan traced back through the addresses they had for Edwin

until they found him in 1939 living at Rumbold Road in Fulham

when he was 24 years old.

So I came across a number of addresses.

On one of the addresses where there was an Edwin Howard living,

there was another lady that showed,

so I made the assumption it was his wife.

At Rumbold Road in 1939, Edwin was living with a Grace Howard.

All right, then.

It was the first potential family member they had found for Edwin,

and could be a vital way of solving the mystery of Edwin's wider kin.

But Alan was in for a surprise

when he looked further into Grace's own history.

And I found a death for her and I applied for a copy of that death

and when it came back, it actually turned out to be his mother

that he was living with.

This was even better news for Alan.

Having Edwin's mother's name of Grace Howard led him closer to

finding both parents, the key to starting the heir hunt properly.

But as Alan dug deeper into the records for Grace and Edwin Howard,

he was in for another shock.

I was considering going back on the previous addresses for the deceased

and the house that they were living at,

on one year, they showed up with a completely different surname.

The name of Qutab.

This case was getting strange.

Between 1938 and 1939, Edwin and his mother, Grace, decided to change

their name from Qutab to Howard.

But why Edwin and Grace changed their surname remained a mystery.

So as a result of that, I then looked for the birth of the deceased

under this name of Qutab, and I found it.

The team was delighted.

The birth certificate matched with the details they already had

for Edwin Howard.

So this is the crucial document for our case.

The most important part of this, really, is the date of birth.

The date of birth shown on this record is the 7th of May 1915,

and that's the same date that's given on the death certificate.

The birth certificate also had more details on Edwin's birth family,

most importantly, his father's name.

His father is Aziz Qutab, and then the mother, Alice Grace Qutab.

The father is stated as a law student and he registered the birth.

Knowing Edwin's mother and father's names meant they could confirm

he was an only child.

There would be no brothers and sisters to inherit Edwin's estate.

OK, thank you. Bye.

So the hunt was now on to find his aunts and uncles on both sides of

the family. With this flood of new information on Edwin's parents,

Alan got stuck into looking at his father.

I then found him coming into England in about 1909,

and it also said he was from the Punjab, which is in India.

Edwin's father Aziz's journey to Britain wasn't that unusual,

as at the time, India was still the jewel in the crown

of Britain's empire.

Britain was the ruling power,

and had been, through the East India Company,

for about 300 years.

Aziz had a ready-made Indian expat community in London.

He certainly wouldn't have been a rarity, particularly in London.

There were a fair number of Indians coming over,

certainly before World War I, to study law.

Aziz would have come from a very distinct part of Indian society.

He would be from a wealthy background,

and I should imagine a westernised background, too.

Aziz himself would've been welcomed by English high society.

Indians at that time were generally fairly well accepted,

and there are several reasons for this.

Obviously if you've come here to study law,

you're going to come from a wealthy family, and it's a question of class

rather than race.

So if you're upper-class, as Aziz obviously was,

then he's going to be accepted.

Race really played no part in it.

And his liaison with Edwin's mother Grace, a working-class English girl,

wouldn't have been out of the ordinary.

Many Englishmen of this period,

particularly working-class Englishman,

were the kind of people Grace probably imagined she would marry.

By comparison, a tall, young upper-class Indian is going to be

very, very attractive indeed.

But if we assume that Grace was a pretty young woman

and Qutab Aziz was a handsome young man,

I think you can see how it happened.

But it's unlikely Aziz considered the relationship with Grace

would be one which would last.

It wouldn't have been a mix of social equals.

Very, very opposite to that.

It certainly wouldn't have been frowned upon by upper-class society.

They would've just winked because, let's face it,

English upper-class society were doing

exactly the same kind of thing all the time.

I should imagine that Grace's father wasn't at all pleased, actually.

So, frowns from Grace's family and winks from Qutab Aziz's friends.

Hello?

But Aziz's relationship with Grace appeared to have been

more than just a brief liaison.

The way the birth was registered, it implied that the parents

were married, although I couldn't find one.

As both Grace and Edwin had the second name Qutab,

it seemed Aziz may have married Grace,

but they needed a marriage certificate.

The marriage record is crucial for any estate that we look into.

The reason being is it has so much information about the family on,

particularly the deceased parents.

So if we're looking at a marriage certificate,

we've got the full names, the ages, and their parents' names,

and that's crucial for finding the family.

They searched high and low,

but there was no record in the UK of any marriage between Grace and Aziz.

Whether or not she's filled it in herself

and just stated that she was married,

but I thought it was a bit strange.

Gareth's started to lose hope.

One of the potential reasons that we can't find a marriage is

obviously maybe they never actually did get married.

But as the team looked deeper into the family,

shock revelations will lead the heir hunters further than ever before

in the hunt for Edwin's heirs.

He does then show up in the 1950s in Africa.

I tied it down for Nairobi, which is Kenya.

Were they going to be able to track down heirs to Edwin's estate?

Every year in Britain, thousands of people get

a surprise knock on the door from the heir hunters.

Inheriting it, well, it's surreal.

I don't expect anybody to sort of leave me anything.

But there are over 11,000 unsolved cases worth at least £5.5 million

where heirs need to be found.

Today, we've got details

of two estates on the government legal department's

bona vacantia list that are yet to be cracked.

Could you be the heirs they are looking for?

The first case on the list is Alison Myrtle Dare,

who died in Shepway, Kent, on the 27th of March 1988 at the age of 88.

Alison had been married to Alfred Julius Dare, and her maiden name

was Wheeler. Do you remember Alison and Alfred Dare in Kent?

Perhaps you're part of Alison's birth family of Wheeler.

The next case is William Richard Meacock,

who died on the 18th of September 1994 in Luton, Bedfordshire.

His date of birth, or age at death, aren't known.

Do you know where or when William was born,

or where his family was from?

Do you know anything that could help solve the cases of Alison Dare

and William Meacock? Perhaps you could be the next of kin.

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

In London, heir hunters Fraser and Fraser were tussling with

the complicated riddle of Edwin Howard's family.

He'd been born in 1915 to an English mother, Grace, and an Indian father,

Aziz, in Fulham, west London,

but the heir hunters couldn't find a marriage record for Aziz and Grace.

If we believe an individual was married, but we can't find

an official record, there can be lots of reasons.

First and foremost, that the marriage has taken place somewhere

where we're not looking or we're not aware of.

Alternatively, there's potential that the marriage

never actually took place.

It was turning out to be a very intriguing case.

Some of the only information they had was that Edwin lived in a flat

in the Sullivan Court estate in Fulham from the 1980s until 2008.

You can see Charing Cross Hospital in the mist.

He would've lived near to current resident Edward.

It's too misty today to see much.

Edwin would've witnessed great social change while living

in the flats, and being half Indian,

he may have felt at home in the cosmopolitan environment.

Me, I've got people from Congo up above.

We've got people from Serbia below.

I've got a Polish chap next door.

At the other end we've got French people,

and below them we've got Portuguese. It's cosmopolitan!

That's just in this little bit.

I just want to clarify with you if we're on the right track or not.

But beyond knowing he lived in Fulham for over 40 years,

the heir hunters had scant information about Edwin's life.

Hang on, let me get this stuff up.

The team had focused on his Indian father, Aziz Qutab,

and they now believed Aziz hadn't married Edwin's mother, Grace,

and had abandoned both of them at some point.

They certainly weren't living together,

according to the electoral rolls.

But if the team could track down Aziz through other methods,

they might stand a chance of finding paternal heirs to Edwin's estate.

Researcher, Alan, kept up the hunt for Aziz.

The deceased's father, Aziz, he actually didn't show up after 1915.

Basically, he just drops straight off the radar,

and he doesn't show again on the 1939 register.

That might have been because he wasn't in England.

But Alan had one final throw of the dice,

and widened his search to cover an entirely new continent.

He does then show up in the 1950s, in Africa.

I tied it down to Nairobi, which is Kenya,

which does have a very large Indian population.

Alan had a good reason to suspect that,

as an Indian lawyer trying to work in London,

Aziz may have left the UK and gone to Africa.

I would have suspected that, given the obstacles that would have

stood in his way, being an Indian guy

trying to work in a very British establishment environment,

he probably wasn't going to go very far, so, ultimately,

he went off and got an opportunity to work in the colonies.

He went to East Africa, I believe, Kenya.

It would have been rare for Aziz to stay in England and practise law.

There really weren't any Indian barristers practising in England.

Or perhaps only a handful.

We don't know what might have taken him to Africa.

It might have been the promise of an even better job.

It's a fairly unusual pattern, but it's not unprecedented.

He would have owed a debt, both financial and moral, to his parents,

who had invested so much in him.

With Aziz under pressure to earn money,

and giving the different social circles Aziz and Grace came from,

it seemed their relationship was doomed.

There's no reason why it should have lasted.

It seems to mean they didn't have very much in common at all,

apart from the child.

Different races, different classes.

I can't see it lasting at all.

In fact, I can't think of any examples

where this kind of relationship did last.

Despite never marrying Aziz, Grace had clung to his name of Qutab

for over 20 years after Edwin's birth in 1915.

It's interesting.

Why did she take his surname?

Perhaps she wanted to give the child, Edwin, some status.

It gives the boy a father.

But, as the heir hunters had already discovered,

Grace and Edwin did change their surname, from Qutab to Howard.

Think they might have changed their name in 1939,

because it was a time of great uncertainty.

Foreigners were suspect and you don't really want to go around

with a foreign name when Britain itself is under threat.

Edwin may have changed his name to Howard,

but the search for his father, Aziz Qutab, was still ongoing.

The problem we have here is simply a lack of records.

There are no records that we can research,

there are no records that we can look into,

certainly in his case.

So, what have we got?

So, we are looking at the maternal side.

While research into Aziz's family was a work in progress,

on the maternal side, the team felt far more confident.

especially when they studied the information

on Edwin's birth certificate.

From the birth of the deceased, we know the mother's name - Grace Fell.

What we needed to do next, really,

is link the Fell family with our deceased.

They quickly traced Edwin's mother's parents.

In this case, her parents were William and Rebecca Fell.

Rebecca and William married in 1870 in London.

They lived in Fulham, and William was a builder and decorator,

and Rebecca was a housewife. Gareth and the team finally had a family

to get their teeth into.

So, once we'd identified the Fell family,

we were able to locate the census records, the birth records

and we were really operating on quite safe ground now,

and the initial problems that we had with this case,

it was quite a relief, really,

in that it became normal research.

But his relief would be short lived, when he noticed Edwin's mother,

Grace Fell, had been born 22 years after her parents got married.

There was a good chance they had children in those two decades.

Gareth checked the birth records with bated breath.

We were able to locate quite a large number.

In fact, a very large number. So, from the research,

we discovered that William and Rebecca had ten further issue.

It was a mountain for Gareth to climb,

and he'd also discovered how much money Edwin had left.

So, this case, it's not got any huge value - £27,000. But it's enough.

It turned out Edwin hadn't owned his property in Fulham,

but there was no giving up now.

Gareth and the team were close to finding heirs.

All cases have potential competition,

and we have to work it as though other companies are looking at it.

So he set about tracing William and Rebecca's children.

So these are the maternal uncles and aunts of the deceased.

-Sinead, that's the tree with what we've got so far.

-OK.

Research showed one of Edwin's maternal aunts, Jessie,

had a daughter, Nora, who, in turn had a daughter called Jacqueline.

After weeks of research, the team had finally found an heir

to Edwin's estate, and they set about contacting her.

No problem at all.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

And for Jacqueline, the news was a bolt out of the blue.

It was unbelievable.

It came as a complete and utter shock.

So I thought, "Oh, lovely, wonderful, whoopee!

"£1 million, here we come!"

It wasn't quite that!

With Gareth and the team likely to find many heirs,

Jacqueline's share of Edwin's estate would be low, but hearing about

Edwin Howard's life has been more than enough for her.

It's definitely made me want to find out more about him.

We have so many secrets in our families, and this was obviously,

I would imagine, one of the secrets.

And with Edwin and his mother having lived only 20 minutes

from Jacqueline's current home,

regret had seeped in alongside her initial surprise.

I think one of the saddest things, for me,

is the fact that he was around.

He died in London.

-Keep that just in case.

-Just in case.

Back in the office, Gareth has rounded off the case.

So we were able to locate a very large number of heirs,

and we eventually ended up with 20 beneficiaries on this case.

Heir Jacqueline is fascinated by Edwin's life and upbringing.

In a way, I think I would rather have met him than receive money,

just to know a little bit more about him, and...

Because it's just...

It's different.

And she's keen to explore her family history further,

and see what surprises it may have in store for her.

And, yes, I'd like to do some research on the family.

Even possibly get in contact with the Qutab family.

Of course, they might be as shocked as I am!

Back in London, heir hunters Finders International are looking into

the £100,000 estate of Eveline Southall.

We managed to find three girls to this marriage.

OK.

But the team have discovered both sides of Eveline's family were huge,

and had difficult surnames to trace.

We had to order a lot of certificates to even get started

into descending each line, so we had to wait for those

to come back into the office before we could really begin

getting stuck into our research.

Suzanne and the team are hoping the certificate will set them

on the fast track to Eveline's heirs.

And, since the first day of research,

more information has come to light about Eveline's life and family.

Her neighbour, Sue, remembers Eveline talking about her family.

She used to tell me a lot about her mum and dad

who were brought up in Kingstanding,

and she idolised her mum and dad.

And from what I can believe, she had a good relationship

and they did a lot together as a family.

Despite being close to her parents,

it seems Eveline wasn't in touch with any extended family,

so it was down to the heir hunters

to try and trace any living relatives.

-So, do you want me to...?

-George needs to be crossed off.

Actually, who's the dad, as well? Is he one of these?

But the team had discovered Eveline had 23 aunts and uncles.

Sorry, one, two, three, four, five.

So there's two missing, so there should be two of these.

In terms of research, it could be a mountain to climb.

When you see there's so many lines to work, you often...

Your heart sinks and you think this is going to be, like,

months of work.

Suzanne has had to order many records in order to trace

potential heirs to Eveline's estate.

Now, these are all certificates for the lines that have children on.

These really helped us to, you know,

start research and descend each line down.

But the certificates have revealed

some surprising information about the family.

Now we've got the certificates in,

we've actually worked out that although there were 15 lines

to start with on the paternal side, in fact only three of them actually

went on to marry and have children.

Although the case was referred to them by a solicitor, there is still

the chance one of their competitors may also be searching

for Eveline's heirs.

I wondered if you could look to see if you could find them.

So Suzanne needs to work fast,

and three of the team are helping track down Eveline's family.

So, you know, just to go through it a bit more. Cool, thank you.

It's all hands on deck.

Holly is calling a potential cousin of Eveline's on her mother's side.

Hi there, I'd like to speak to you about an inheritance matter.

But Holly thinks she hears something

which could throw the whole case into doubt.

So, you found a will listing...

If you let me just pop you on hold one moment,

I'm just going to ask my colleague. Is that OK?

She said that she's found wills and things, and doesn't want to sell.

-What?

-Basically, they're not interested.

-She's found wills?

-Yeah, I didn't understand what she was saying.

Any mention of a will is alarming for the team,

as it could mean all their work tracing family was for nothing.

-Whose will?

-Someone called Arthur.

-Shall I just speak to her?

-Probably best, yes.

Oh, OK.

But Holly confirms with the potential heirs

it's not Eveline's will. It's a huge relief for the team.

However, Holly discovers a new problem.

She said they looked into the tree,

and I think they want to do it themselves.

This potential heir wants to try and prove their claim

to Eveline's estate without Suzanne and the team's help.

-It's a lot of work.

-Yeah.

-Because they're not that closely related, are they?

-No.

For Suzanne, it's yet another complication.

Holly's just spoken to a beneficiary.

They're thinking that they might be able to do the research themselves.

That's something that is absolutely fine for them to do,

there's no reason why they shouldn't,

but we do honestly point out to them the cost involved,

with coming into some inheritance, and you may well eat up

any inheritance due in doing so.

Hi, it's Suzanne, I'm calling in relation to the inheritance matter.

But the team continue to make progress with other heirs,

and start having more positive results.

That's been very helpful, what you've told me.

Suzanne is still looking for heirs on the maternal Manning side.

She's found Eveline's mother had six siblings, one of whom was Alice.

On the line of Alice Manning, a maternal aunt of the deceased,

she marries an Arthur Austins.

Now, I find it quite interesting to see that he was actually a gunmaker.

Now, that was in 1915.

Looking at the occupations of family is a key element of any heir hunt,

and is helping Suzanne trace potential heirs.

Alice and Arthur were living in Birmingham when it was a centre

for the production of guns for the entire British Empire.

The gun making in Britain has always been a proud part of our history,

and it dates back to the mid-17th century.

The military side of things, it really was only Birmingham

and London that were producing guns in any sort of numbers.

At one of the oldest gunmakers in Birmingham,

they make guns as they would have done in Arthur's time.

The process of the gun making, the actual filing, the fitting,

how the lock work goes together and the tools they make

actually haven't changed at all in over 100 years.

Gunmakers were highly skilled, and would handcraft guns

to exceptionally high engineering standards.

Every gun is totally unique to its own component parts.

But when Arthur was working as a gunmaker in 1915,

it was during World War I, and the British Army needed more guns,

and fast.

In Birmingham, the Lee-Enfield 303, the infantryman's rifle,

and also the submachine gun,

was actually both made just down the road from here.

Over the course of the war,

four million rifles were made and sent to the front line,

but once the war ended, fewer men were needed as gunmakers.

Their skills were also very transferable -

they were very skilled engineers -

and also Birmingham paved the way for industrialisation in Birmingham,

and other factories soon set up after they sort of copied

styles of manufacturing from gun making, like sewing machines,

car manufacturing, and even bicycle manufacturing.

Arthur Austins followed this path and became a toolmaker in Birmingham

after World War I...

I've found him!

..which Suzanne has discovered,

as she's traced the three children he had with Eveline's aunt, Alice.

Three cousins of Eveline all passed away,

but two did marry and had children themselves.

On Alice's stem, there's actually three living heirs in total.

After a very difficult start,

the case of Eveline Southall is finally starting to come good,

and Suzanne is able to contact these three heirs.

Two of them are brothers, Peter and John,

who were shocked to hear from Suzanne.

You think, "God, what's this?"

"You're in line for somebody leaving you something.

-"Who can that be from?"

-MIMICS RIPPING ENVELOPE

"Ah, this is a bit of a scam," like, you know?

But Suzanne convinced them it was real.

-Is that all right?

-Yeah.

And today, travelling researcher Dave is visiting Peter and John,

to explain the research in more detail.

Bit of a murky day, so I'm hoping the traffic's going to be good.

Peter and John knew their cousin Eveline,

but lost contact for most of their life,

so they're now keen to know more about their family tree,

as parts of it are still a mystery to them.

We'll take the opportunity then of trying to find out the history

of the family. We know very, very little.

-Hi, is it John?

-Yeah, hello.

Hi. I believe you're expecting me.

Yes, I am, come in.

-Thank you.

-Follow me.

This is my brother, Peter.

I think I've got a bit of an interesting story to tell you.

Oh, good.

The first thing I think you might find interesting is the stages

where we're up to at the moment with the family tree.

So, as you can see, it spreads across...

..quite a bit of pages.

-It's quite a big family.

-It is, isn't it?

Peter and John are most interested in their grandfather,

Arthur Austins, who they knew very little about.

Frankly, I didn't know that me grandfather's name was Arthur.

Oh, right. That's a new one.

We never met him. They died before we were born.

Right.

And Arthur's various jobs strike a chord with the brothers.

So, there we go. And he's down as a toolmaker.

He was a toolmaker.

-You were a tool...?

-I was a toolmaker, yeah.

-What did you do?

-Until we moved to Blackpool. In the motor industry.

In the motor industry?

Yeah, we made the dyes for making the cast skins, you know.

Back in the office, the team have finally tracked down

almost all the heirs.

The good news is that we've had all of the certificates in

that we need now, and we've spoken to family members,

and it turns out that both sides of the family is correct, and we have

received some signatures back from the majority of beneficiaries.

They found 34 heirs in total,

a huge amount from a family who had ended up being so small.

Heirs Peter and John are happy to have been reconnected

with their family history.

It's actually solved a couple of minor mysteries,

as to who my grandfather was, and it's very, very interesting

to find out.

And it's brought happy memories of Eveline flooding back.

It was very, very nice to put a face to a name, and it was nice to say,

"I knew Eveline quite well."