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Today the heir hunters have their work cut out. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:06 | |
When a whole family tends to change their name, | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
this really makes our job difficult. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:11 | |
And it turns into a numbers game. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:14 | |
If you can't find someone's marriage, | 0:00:14 | 0:00:16 | |
you could potentially be dealing with hundreds of marriages. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:19 | |
Across London, another team take on a case that is almost 30 years old. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:24 | |
If a person is born illegitimately, and only the mother is named, | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
it halves your chances of being able to find any heirs. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:31 | |
And just when they think they are home and dry... | 0:00:31 | 0:00:34 | |
Unfortunately, the government legal department rejected the claim. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
It's the autumn of 2016, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:49 | |
and a new case has caught the attention of heir hunting firm Finders International. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:54 | |
At the moment we are currently looking into the case of | 0:00:54 | 0:00:56 | |
Marie Windsor. | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
This is a new government legal department advert which was advertised today. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:03 | |
We've just mapped out the family from the very beginning. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
Actually, we don't know the value of this estate, | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
but that's always interesting and it's a good point to work from, | 0:01:09 | 0:01:13 | |
and we can always find out a bit more | 0:01:13 | 0:01:14 | |
once it's over with the solicitors. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
Knowing the value of an estate is crucial, | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
as heir hunters work on commission, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
earning a pre-agreed percentage of an estate in return for | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
finding heirs and helping them claim their inheritance. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:28 | |
This is a very urgent case, | 0:01:28 | 0:01:30 | |
and it is going to be very competitive so we have to be quick. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
Marie lived on a council estate in London, | 0:01:33 | 0:01:36 | |
and although the team don't know whether she owned her flat, | 0:01:36 | 0:01:39 | |
they think it could be worth a punt. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
Sometimes we may work a case | 0:01:42 | 0:01:44 | |
whereby the deceased lived in a council property. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
We might do this because we think there is hidden value in the case, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
or that the property was in a place of high value, such as London, | 0:01:50 | 0:01:53 | |
where the properties are often worth more. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
Believing the case could be competitive, | 0:01:56 | 0:01:58 | |
the team quickly need to establish some basic facts. | 0:01:58 | 0:02:02 | |
The hospital should hopefully help us find out a bit more | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
about the deceased, hoping to speak to the bereavement office, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:08 | |
and they should be able to give us any information that they have, | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
what she was in the hospital for, | 0:02:12 | 0:02:13 | |
and also they should be able to help us a bit more with our research. | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
Marie Windsor, who was known as Mairi, | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
died aged 82 in Guy's Hospital in London in September 2015. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:30 | |
For over 50 years, she lived on this housing estate in Lambeth, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:34 | |
and she worked at the local launderette. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:36 | |
Neighbour Jo Nevins struck up a firm friendship with Mairi. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:40 | |
She lived on the floor below me, with her parents. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:45 | |
How can I say it? She was very... | 0:02:45 | 0:02:48 | |
straight in her answers, there was no messing about with Mairi, she... | 0:02:48 | 0:02:53 | |
She was lovely. She really was. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:55 | |
I'm sad because she was lovely, she was a nice, nice lady. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:05 | |
As I say, we both were the same age so we got on well together. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:09 | |
She never ever spoke of family at all, except for her mum and dad, | 0:03:09 | 0:03:14 | |
but she never spoke of any close relatives ever. | 0:03:14 | 0:03:17 | |
As far as I knew, she was an only child because, you know, | 0:03:17 | 0:03:21 | |
she never spoke of any siblings. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
With no known family, and no sign of a will, | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
it was up to the team in the office to try and find Mairi's heirs. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:32 | |
They began by piecing together information from Mairi's birth and death certificates. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:44 | |
It looks like she hasn't married, and so... And she doesn't have | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
any brothers and sisters from our initial research, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:53 | |
so it looks like it's going to go into paternal and maternal family. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:57 | |
The paternal side of the family is Windsor, | 0:03:57 | 0:04:00 | |
and there seems to be three living stems on that side on the 1911 census. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:05 | |
And on the maternal side, the surname is McGill, | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
and this side is much larger. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:11 | |
There's actually 13 stems on this side, with 12 living on the 1911. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:16 | |
We're just going to start mapping out the family tree, | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
and hopefully go from there, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
but I imagine it's going to be quite a large family by the end. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
Mairi was the only child | 0:04:25 | 0:04:27 | |
of Leo Bernard Windsor and Ellen Josephine McGill, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
who married in St George's, Hanover Square in London in 1932. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:35 | |
With no siblings, | 0:04:35 | 0:04:37 | |
the team needed to look to Mairi's parents' families to find heirs, | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
and her mother Ellen's side soon caused problems. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
Unfortunately she swapped her first name with her middle name a lot, | 0:04:43 | 0:04:48 | |
between Ellen and Josephine. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:49 | |
This meant that through the records we had to look for all these | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
different combinations of names to make sure that we found the correct family. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
Things were not looking any better on the paternal side. | 0:04:55 | 0:04:58 | |
Camilla had established that Mairi's father Leo had two brothers, | 0:04:58 | 0:05:02 | |
and the search for their descendants wasn't looking good. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
On the paternal side of the family, | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
we know that George Thomas Windsor actually passed away | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
in the First World War in 1914. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:12 | |
His brother, Frank Hector Windsor, passed away in 1973. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
However, it doesn't look like he had any children with his wife Irma. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:21 | |
With the paternal Windsor side out of the equation, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:23 | |
any hope of finding heirs rested with the McGill side of the family. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:28 | |
Mairi's grandfather John married Mary Ann Egan in 1890, | 0:05:28 | 0:05:33 | |
and they had 12 children. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
It was a huge family, | 0:05:35 | 0:05:36 | |
and initial research suggested they moved around. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
When we initially found the census records | 0:05:41 | 0:05:43 | |
for the McGill side of the family, | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
we realised that a lot of the maternal aunts and uncles | 0:05:45 | 0:05:49 | |
had been born in different areas of England, | 0:05:49 | 0:05:51 | |
and also outside of England, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:53 | |
and that was quite a surprise for us initially. | 0:05:53 | 0:05:55 | |
The reason for this started to become clear | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
when the team dug deeper into Mairi's grandfather, John McGill. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
This is a war record she found, we think it's his record, | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
it shows him at 12 years old going into the army. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
So it's quite an interesting record. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
We can't find much else about his army days, | 0:06:10 | 0:06:12 | |
we do know that he was a sergeant, | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
but he was in the Bengal East India Army. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:18 | |
John seemed to have moved around a lot during his time in the army, | 0:06:18 | 0:06:21 | |
and met Mairi's grandmother Mary while stationed in Gibraltar. | 0:06:21 | 0:06:26 | |
John McGill was in the East Lancashire Regiment, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
and rose through the ranks to become sergeant. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
John, as an army child, would have followed his parents overseas, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:39 | |
and most of his youth | 0:06:39 | 0:06:41 | |
he was actually in the Far East. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
It was entirely common | 0:06:44 | 0:06:46 | |
for children to be born wherever the regiment was, | 0:06:46 | 0:06:49 | |
and the regiment is constantly moving, | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
so naturally children would be born all over the place. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:56 | |
The normal thing often for a soldier's son | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
would be to join as a boy in the regiment, | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
and we think because he eventually ended up in the band, | 0:07:02 | 0:07:06 | |
that John joined as a band boy. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
Aged just 12 years old, John followed in his father's footsteps. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:13 | |
You have to remember, first of all, | 0:07:13 | 0:07:15 | |
that the army in those days marched almost everywhere. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:19 | |
And particularly if you're doing a long route march in India, | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
day after day, | 0:07:24 | 0:07:26 | |
every time they went through a village or town | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
they'd strike up, and so very good for morale. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
But it seems he had a knack of getting himself into trouble. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
In his youth, say 18 to 23, | 0:07:38 | 0:07:42 | |
he was probably a bit of a lad. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
They use to get good conduct pay in those days. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
Well, he forfeited it four times for a year at a stretch each time. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:55 | |
Almost inevitably, it's going to be to do with drink and women, | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
possibly in combination! | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
And particularly in India, there were long periods | 0:08:01 | 0:08:06 | |
when there was not a lot happening. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:08 | |
He then got married, which perhaps could have been | 0:08:08 | 0:08:12 | |
the trigger to an even greater feeling of responsibility, | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
because relatively shortly after that, he was first of all | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
promoted to corporal, full corporal, | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
then to lance sergeant and then to sergeant, | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
and I suspect there was probably a lady behind him | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
doing a bit of pushing. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
John served in the Far East and Gibraltar | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
before returning back to the UK, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:35 | |
and wherever he went, his family would have followed. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
Well, this is Burnley barracks, | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
and it's the part that the married families lived in, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
so that's where he would have lived. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
If you look closely at it, you will see on the doorsteps of the buildings, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:49 | |
you will see two little groups of married families there, | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
who of course could include John's. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
John's time in the army meant the team had to search far and wide | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
to find where his children had been born. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:04 | |
They actually had a child in Gibraltar as well | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
before moving to Dover, so they seem to have moved around quite a lot. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
But by 1902, John was retired and living in Dover, Kent. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:14 | |
The heir hunters had to find which of his children had married | 0:09:14 | 0:09:17 | |
and had family themselves, | 0:09:17 | 0:09:19 | |
as it would be these cousins who would inherit Mairi's estate. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:23 | |
When we initially started research into the family tree, | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
we realised that most of the aunts and uncles of the deceased | 0:09:27 | 0:09:31 | |
on the maternal side had quite a few middle names, | 0:09:31 | 0:09:34 | |
which is usually quite helpful for our research. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
So we were hoping that we would be able to find people quite easily. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
But on the stem of Mairi's uncle, Frederick, | 0:09:41 | 0:09:43 | |
it turned out the middle names were a hindrance rather than a help. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:48 | |
Frederick William John McGill, he was known by so many names. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:52 | |
He is listed on the 1901 census as John, the 1911 census as William, | 0:09:52 | 0:09:58 | |
and passes away as his Christian name. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
So this becomes quite difficult for us, | 0:10:01 | 0:10:04 | |
because obviously we have to consider so many different marriages | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
as a possible for Frederick. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
And it wasn't just Frederick causing issues. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
Elizabeth Ann McGill, who was a maternal aunt of the deceased, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:18 | |
she obviously used the name Elizabeth | 0:10:18 | 0:10:20 | |
as she passed away under that name, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
however she also used the name Laura. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:24 | |
This was completely unknown to us at the beginning of our research, | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
and therefore we struggled to find a marriage for her originally. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
It was only when we found her death record that we were then able | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
to discover that she actually married under the name Laura, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
and therefore that's why we couldn't find her. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
Worryingly for the team, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:42 | |
the pattern of name changes continued across the family tree. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:46 | |
Mary used the name Margaret and May, | 0:10:46 | 0:10:50 | |
and this was just very hard for us | 0:10:50 | 0:10:51 | |
to know which name she would have married under, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
which name she would have passed away under, | 0:10:54 | 0:10:56 | |
obviously we had to consider any children she may have had, | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
she may have been using a different name on their birth certificate. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
The research was now looking time-consuming and complex. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
When a whole family tends to change their name, | 0:11:06 | 0:11:09 | |
this really makes our job difficult because we are then dealing with | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
potentially 11 or 12 people who we have no idea what name | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
they're going by when they get married, when they pass away. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
At this stage, the team still had no idea if Mairi's estate | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
would be valuable enough to cover their costs. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:26 | |
Would their gamble to take it on pay off? | 0:11:26 | 0:11:29 | |
Sometimes, the work of the heir hunters can uncover a family secret | 0:11:33 | 0:11:38 | |
that was taken to the grave. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:39 | |
Oh, right, OK. Well, that's interesting. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
And that was the case when Celtic Research took on the estate of a man called Colin Maclennan. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:48 | |
There are some people who live the most unusual lives, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:51 | |
dramatic lives, interesting lives, | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
and you could write whole books on them. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:56 | |
The company is run by father and son team Peter and Hector Birchwood, | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
and they have case managers based around the UK. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
Like most firms, they scour the government's Bona Vacantia list, | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
looking for newly advertised estates. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:10 | |
But they also take on much older cases | 0:12:10 | 0:12:12 | |
in the hope of succeeding where others have failed. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
Estates often lay unclaimed for many years because nobody has been able | 0:12:15 | 0:12:19 | |
to solve them, so we like to revisit these cases. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
Perhaps there's a new piece of information has come up recently | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
that may be able to help us solve them. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
The estate of Colin Maclennan was one such case. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
He had died on April 23, 1989, and time was running out | 0:12:32 | 0:12:37 | |
to find heirs to his estimated £12,000 estate. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
If an estate has been unclaimed for 30 years, it becomes irrecoverable. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:45 | |
And it will fall to the Crown. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
Because Colin had died in 1989, the deadline was looming, | 0:12:48 | 0:12:52 | |
so I knew that if nobody presented a claim | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
it would fall to the government forever. | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
Colin died in a hotel in the Lake District town of Windermere aged 63. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:08 | |
He had lived in Paddington in West London for much of his life, | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
and rented a flat in this tower block. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:14 | |
He worked as a porter, but little else is known about him, | 0:13:14 | 0:13:17 | |
and sadly no photos of him have survived. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:21 | |
Brenda Flynn has lived in Paddington for over 50 years, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:25 | |
and saw the area change a great deal during the '70s and '80s, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
when Colin was also living there. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:31 | |
It's changed a lot. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:32 | |
When I first moved here, there was a bakery, | 0:13:32 | 0:13:36 | |
two fishmongers, | 0:13:36 | 0:13:38 | |
but it's mostly the business side that has changed so much, | 0:13:38 | 0:13:42 | |
and there weren't as many children and dogs there | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
then as there are now. | 0:13:45 | 0:13:48 | |
Hector had very little information to go on, | 0:13:52 | 0:13:54 | |
and Colin's surname was a cause for concern. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:57 | |
The surname Maclennan, spelled M-A-C, is not particularly common. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:03 | |
Unfortunately we can't rule out other variants, | 0:14:03 | 0:14:06 | |
using Mc, for example, which is much more common, | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
because that is an acceptable way of spelling the name | 0:14:09 | 0:14:12 | |
and people can alternate between one or the other, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:15 | |
so given that, we knew that it was going to be difficult | 0:14:15 | 0:14:19 | |
to search for this particular family. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
And that was not the only potential problem Hector faced. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:25 | |
If a name sounds Scottish or Irish, | 0:14:25 | 0:14:26 | |
it can lead to many different avenues of research. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
If it's Irish, sometimes the records won't be available. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
But both for Scottish and Irish estates, | 0:14:33 | 0:14:36 | |
because of the migration patterns, they may have gone | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
to the United States or even Canada, | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
so we then have to keep in mind | 0:14:41 | 0:14:43 | |
that we may have to look elsewhere to find a family. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
Undeterred, Hector begun the search | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
and he was quickly able to rule out immediate family. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:53 | |
We looked through the marriage indexes, | 0:14:53 | 0:14:56 | |
all throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland for Colin | 0:14:56 | 0:14:59 | |
and we didn't find any that matched. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:01 | |
Given he had no known children, | 0:15:01 | 0:15:03 | |
that meant that we had to search through his parents | 0:15:03 | 0:15:06 | |
for any siblings or any other cousins that might be able to claim. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:11 | |
But having found a record of Colin's birth, | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
the case suddenly became even more complicated. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
It showed that his mother was Mary Maclennan. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:19 | |
He was born in a women and children's hospital, | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
and he was born illegitimately. There was no father listed. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
It was yet another bad sign for Hector. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
If a person is born illegitimately and only the mother is named, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:33 | |
it halves your chances of being able to find any heirs, | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
because you can only trace the maternal family. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:39 | |
Colin's birth certificate had also revealed that, at the time, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
his mother Mary was working as a domestic servant - | 0:15:45 | 0:15:49 | |
a common career choice for young girls back then. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:52 | |
People hired domestic servants | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
because looking after houses in an age where domestic technology | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
was still something that was emerging | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
was an awful lot of hard work and extremely time-consuming. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
It's more than a full-time job for one person, | 0:16:05 | 0:16:07 | |
even in the smallest household. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
The people that would be hiring domestic servants in the late 1920s | 0:16:09 | 0:16:12 | |
and then the early '30s varied from town to town and place to place, | 0:16:12 | 0:16:16 | |
but in London, you run the whole gamut between the royal family, | 0:16:16 | 0:16:20 | |
right the way down to lower-middle-class families. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
The address of Mary's first job suggests | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
she was working for a very wealthy family. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:28 | |
Mary would have been working a very fancy household in London. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
Hyde Park Gardens is a street which is just off Hyde Park itself | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
and that has been for many hundreds of years | 0:16:37 | 0:16:39 | |
one of the most exclusive addresses in London, | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
so these houses are so big, they have separate accommodation for their servants. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:47 | |
But whatever the house, | 0:16:47 | 0:16:48 | |
the life of a domestic servant could be very tough. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
In London households, you would have been up at the crack of dawn, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
around 5am, 5.30am, because a lot of the work | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
and the particularly dirty work like cleaning, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
setting fires, cleaning doorsteps, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
would have been expected to be finished by the time that the family | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
were awake and up in the house. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:09 | |
And you're never really off-duty if your employer is ill, | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
if their children need you in the middle of the night, | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
you can't very well not answer a bell. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:17 | |
You have to go down. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
It seemed Mary had gone into service aged just 14, | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
but soon afterwards fell unexpectedly pregnant. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
It definitely wouldn't have been uncommon | 0:17:25 | 0:17:27 | |
for girls employed in domestic service to get pregnant. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:32 | |
However, if they did become pregnant, they would lose their job, | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
so they would have had to try and hide it, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
or quit their job before they started showing. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:41 | |
The actual people she could turn to would have been very minimal | 0:17:41 | 0:17:45 | |
and also, just depended, obviously, on who the father was. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
I mean, if the father was, say, you know, the master of the household, | 0:17:48 | 0:17:52 | |
then certainly she wouldn't want him to know. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:55 | |
The likelihood is, if relatives and work colleagues would have found out | 0:17:55 | 0:17:58 | |
she was pregnant, | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
they would have publicly shunned her because it was shameful. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:04 | |
It would have been a daunting time for the young Mary. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
During this whole process, it's likely | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
that Mary would have felt anxious, scared, nervous, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
her body's changing, she's so young and, you know, | 0:18:15 | 0:18:20 | |
you don't know the circumstances of how she got pregnant. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:22 | |
When it came to having her baby, Mary really only had one option. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:27 | |
Women's hospitals were starting to become more common in the 1920s. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:31 | |
These hospitals were for women that were pregnant, | 0:18:31 | 0:18:35 | |
that were out of wedlock. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:37 | |
Conditions for childbirth during this time | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
would have been very basic, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:41 | |
so the likelihood is, for somebody so young, | 0:18:41 | 0:18:44 | |
you would have been very scared. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:45 | |
There wouldn't have been all the equipment and machines. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
It just would have been a midwife, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:50 | |
very little in terms of pain relief. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:53 | |
You would have had that attitude of, right, you just get on with it. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
"You've got pregnant, you get on with it and you give birth." | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
The circumstances surrounding Colin's birth were significant for Hector. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:10 | |
The fact that Mary was so young when she had Colin made us think about | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
what happened afterwards. He could have been living with his mother, | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
as many children did, however, | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
he could have also been fostered out to another family. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
Hector also had to consider the possibility | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
that Colin had been adopted | 0:19:26 | 0:19:27 | |
and if he had, this would have a huge bearing on the research. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:31 | |
When adoption laws were brought in in 1926, | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
it changed inheritance rights | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
so adopted children gained all the inheritance rights | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
from the family that they were adopted into and they lost | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
all the inheritance rights for their biological family. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
Hector needed to know what had happened to Colin. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:49 | |
He finally found a record of him on the 1946 electoral register. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:54 | |
We found him living in Willesden with the Parker family. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
But unfortunately, he wasn't there living with his mother. | 0:19:57 | 0:19:59 | |
Was this a clue that Colin had been adopted? | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
And if so, would Hector be able to find heirs | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
and finally crack a 26-year-old case? | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
In the UK, every year, | 0:20:12 | 0:20:14 | |
thousands of people are informed of a completely unexpected inheritance. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:19 | |
It was exciting when I got the call, | 0:20:19 | 0:20:21 | |
cos then I could now find out that I have got relatives out there | 0:20:21 | 0:20:24 | |
that I didn't know anything about that. | 0:20:24 | 0:20:26 | |
The heir hunters often unite | 0:20:26 | 0:20:27 | |
relatives who weren't aware of each other, | 0:20:27 | 0:20:30 | |
as well as handing over surprise windfalls. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
Family account with £320,000 in it. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:36 | |
No way! | 0:20:36 | 0:20:38 | |
But there are still cases that have left the heir hunters baffled | 0:20:39 | 0:20:43 | |
and today, we have details of two. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
First is Minnie Needle, who passed away on the 6th of October 1989. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:51 | |
She was born in Carlisle in Cumbria in 1908. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
And her parents were Charles MacDonald Needle and Annie Dobie. | 0:20:55 | 0:21:00 | |
It is believed Minnie may have had a son. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:02 | |
Do you know who this could be? | 0:21:02 | 0:21:04 | |
Next is the estate of James William Galway, | 0:21:04 | 0:21:08 | |
who was born in Belfast in 1921. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:11 | |
James never married and sadly passed away in Lambeth in 1997. | 0:21:11 | 0:21:16 | |
Could Minnie or James be a relative of yours? | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
If so, there could be a surprise inheritance coming your way. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:23 | |
Heir hunting firm Finders International were searching for | 0:21:28 | 0:21:32 | |
beneficiaries of Mairi Windsor, who had died in London. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
This case was advertised by the government legal department, | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
so we've picked up on it from there. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:40 | |
While the value of her estate was unknown, | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
the case was proving to be riddled with complications. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:47 | |
The challenges on the maternal side were the name changes, mainly, | 0:21:47 | 0:21:52 | |
and also the fact that everyone moved around quite often. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
We were dealing with so many different countries, | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
and places within England, we were unsure as to where people were. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
So it affected more of our early stages of research. | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
Mairi Windsor had passed away in September 2015 | 0:22:09 | 0:22:14 | |
without leaving a will. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:16 | |
She'd lived on this Lambeth housing estate for over 50 years, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:19 | |
where she became good friends with her neighbour Joan Evans. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
We were of the same age and we sort of got on well together. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:31 | |
You know, she was... | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
She was a good neighbour. Really good neighbour. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
You know, I used to go out shopping | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
and she'd be on the balcony with her cat and we'd have a chat | 0:22:41 | 0:22:46 | |
and, yeah, we were quite friendly. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
Having established there were no heirs | 0:22:54 | 0:22:56 | |
on the paternal side of the family, | 0:22:56 | 0:22:58 | |
the team were pinning all their hopes on the maternal side. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
And it was proving tricky. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
So many people are using their middle names | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
rather than their first names, | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
and this has caused us to doubt | 0:23:08 | 0:23:10 | |
a lot of the information that we've found. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:14 | |
The team knew they were under pressure from the competition. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
We have come across two other companies | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
who are also working this case, so it's now become highly competitive | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
and we need to make sure that we're being quick with our research. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:27 | |
When dealing with a large family, obviously, you have you have to | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
keep in mind the competition may be working on a different stem | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
and therefore, they may be able to contact someone before you do, | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
because you've been occupied with another family member. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
Mairi's mum Ellen was one of 12, | 0:23:41 | 0:23:44 | |
which made it a huge family to look into. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:47 | |
Research had shown that four of Ellen's brothers | 0:23:47 | 0:23:49 | |
and one of her sisters had died without having children. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:53 | |
But there were still five stems of the family | 0:23:53 | 0:23:55 | |
that could potentially lead to heirs. | 0:23:55 | 0:23:57 | |
-Have you had any luck finding a death for Evelyn? -No. -No, nothing. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:02 | |
No. Because I don't know whether she's under... | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
-Evelyn or Alice. -Evelyn or Alice. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 | |
With most of Mairi's aunts and uncles appearing to change names, | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
Camilla had to order certificates to be certain who was who. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:14 | |
We also received a few birth certificates back, | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
especially the one of Alice Evelyn McGill and that may help us with | 0:24:17 | 0:24:21 | |
finding what Alice... | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
What name Alice passed away as. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:27 | |
We know that she married and she had three children. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
However, we are struggling at the moment to find that marriage | 0:24:30 | 0:24:33 | |
and to find the children. | 0:24:33 | 0:24:35 | |
But while some stems were still proving tricky, | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
there were signs the team's research | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
was finally starting to pay dividends. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
We'll keep working with the maternal side. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:44 | |
We know that there's five possible heirs now on another stem. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:48 | |
We were told that there's two heirs, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:50 | |
so we'll hopefully find someone within the next few hours | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
and let them know of the inheritance. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
And it wasn't long before that research paid off. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:00 | |
One of the aunts who was causing problems for the team | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
was Mary McGill. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:06 | |
It does become quite difficult if you can't find someone's marriage. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
You could be potentially dealing with hundreds of marriages, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
if it's a common surname or even a common first name. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
After many hours of research, | 0:25:15 | 0:25:17 | |
the team finally got through to someone who could help. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
Thanks, bye. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:22 | |
When speaking to family members, | 0:25:24 | 0:25:26 | |
we discovered that Mary McGill married a Parker | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
and whilst we couldn't find a Mary McGill marrying a Mr Parker, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:34 | |
we were able to find a marriage certificate for a May McGill. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
Mary had been going under the name May and she had married a Mr Parker. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:43 | |
And we believe they had three children together | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
who would have all been cousins of the deceased. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
They started with the eldest child first. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:50 | |
One of the siblings who has passed away, called Frida, | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
she actually went on to have seven children herself | 0:25:54 | 0:25:57 | |
and these will all be cousins once removed of the deceased. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
It was a crucial breakthrough and the team could now begin | 0:26:00 | 0:26:04 | |
trying to contact these seven potential heirs. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
One of them was Eileen, | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
a keen amateur genealogist who knew of Mairi's mum as Josephine, | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
but, worryingly, her research didn't fully match Camilla's. | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
When I spoke to them, they told me they were looking for relatives of | 0:26:19 | 0:26:25 | |
Marie Windsor. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
And I said I'd never heard of Marie Windsor. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:31 | |
She'd never come up on any of my research that I'd done. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:35 | |
And I was unsure whose child she would be. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
Had they definitely got the right person? | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
Then they sent me some details for me to look at | 0:26:46 | 0:26:51 | |
and I found that she was born in 1933, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:56 | |
which I thought, realised, that she must... | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
could only be the child of Josephine, because all the others, | 0:26:58 | 0:27:03 | |
I knew their children, and they were a lot older. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
Having understood her connection to Mairi, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:09 | |
Eileen still couldn't understand why she hadn't known about | 0:27:09 | 0:27:13 | |
her cousin once removed, | 0:27:13 | 0:27:15 | |
but a possible answer seemed to lie on the other side of the world. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
From the mid-1940s, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:20 | |
the Australian government introduced a variety of initiatives | 0:27:20 | 0:27:24 | |
to try and encourage Brits to emigrate. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
This included the famous £10 Pom scheme, | 0:27:27 | 0:27:30 | |
where people only had to pay £10 for their sea fare to Australia. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:34 | |
With opportunities in post-war Britain limited, | 0:27:35 | 0:27:38 | |
thousands of people made the move down under | 0:27:38 | 0:27:42 | |
and it seems Mairi Windsor was among them. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:44 | |
In 1950, aged 17, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:46 | |
she boarded a boat bound for Sydney and she was listed as a housemaid. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:51 | |
Mairi returned to Britain shortly afterwards, but by then, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
it appears she and her parents had lost touch with their family. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
I really didn't know, we missed out of knowing her, because in London, | 0:28:01 | 0:28:06 | |
we have quite a few... three other cousins | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
and I'm surprised that they didn't know about her, | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
unless she didn't know that she had relatives in London. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:15 | |
When Eileen was doing her own research into the family, | 0:28:15 | 0:28:19 | |
Josephine had always been a mystery. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
If we could have traced Josephine, | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
then we would have probably known about her, but unfortunately, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:28 | |
only having her maiden name, | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
if you put that into a site, it very rarely comes up | 0:28:31 | 0:28:35 | |
with their connections to marriage or anything else. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:39 | |
The only thing I can think of is that if she went to Australia, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:42 | |
she came back and didn't contact anybody. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
And you know, I don't say they were a close family | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
but I think that they were in touch with one another in general. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:53 | |
So I just don't know how that happened. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:57 | |
But Eileen can recall seeing her other relatives while growing up. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
I mean, the fact that I knew some of them when I was young, very young, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
a child, because I used to stay with my grandparents. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:09 | |
I mean, I think I saw my Auntie Connie twice | 0:29:09 | 0:29:12 | |
and she only lived seven miles away. | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
Of course, in those days, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
you didn't have the transport to get around | 0:29:17 | 0:29:19 | |
and the only reason I know of my aunt Evelyn in London | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
is because we used to stay with her sometimes in London, | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
so we knew her and her children. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
And I was quite surprised to find | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
that so many of the children didn't have children. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
It's unusual in a family not to know you've got cousins, | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
you know, within a stone's throw of you. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:45 | |
For Eileen, it's been an unexpected revelation | 0:29:45 | 0:29:49 | |
and one she wishes had come sooner. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:51 | |
I was amazed to find that we had got another relative | 0:29:51 | 0:29:56 | |
and that we knew nothing about her, which I find very sad, really, | 0:29:56 | 0:30:00 | |
that she, you know, didn't know that she had | 0:30:00 | 0:30:03 | |
other relatives and I think that's quite a sad thing, really. | 0:30:03 | 0:30:07 | |
And that she only died last year and if we'd known about her, | 0:30:07 | 0:30:11 | |
we could've got in contact. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:13 | |
In addition to Eileen, | 0:30:15 | 0:30:17 | |
the team in the office had signed up a further 16 heirs | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
and they were pleased they'd been able to solve a case | 0:30:21 | 0:30:24 | |
that at times looked complicated and daunting. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:27 | |
If you begin a family tree which you know is quite large, | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
especially if you're dealing with something | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
within the double figures of 10 or 11 stems, for example, | 0:30:33 | 0:30:36 | |
you always must keep in mind that potentially quite a lot of these may die out. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:40 | |
So initially your research may seem like quite a lot, | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
however, especially with children born in the 1800s, | 0:30:43 | 0:30:47 | |
there were quite a few infant deaths or people died quite young | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
before they had children, | 0:30:50 | 0:30:51 | |
in which case your research is suddenly quite small in comparison | 0:30:51 | 0:30:54 | |
to what you thought it might be. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
But there was a key question still outstanding for the team. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
They'd taken on the case without knowing its value | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
and when the size of the estate was eventually revealed, | 0:31:04 | 0:31:07 | |
it wasn't quite what they'd hoped for. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:09 | |
The estate was worth just under £7,000 in the end. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:12 | |
In terms of its worth for working, there was a lot of research | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
and it involved a lot more than we initially hoped. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:18 | |
We hoped that it would be of higher value, but we did locate | 0:31:18 | 0:31:22 | |
all the beneficiaries who will be entitled to a share in her estate | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
so we solved the case in the end. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:28 | |
Whilst it may not have been the company's most lucrative case, | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
it has certainly been very satisfying for Camilla and the team. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:35 | |
When you resolve a difficult case, it does feel very rewarding, | 0:31:35 | 0:31:38 | |
it's when you've been tracing a certain line for weeks, potentially, | 0:31:38 | 0:31:42 | |
and you've ordered lots of certificates | 0:31:42 | 0:31:44 | |
and knowing that you've put a lot of time into it, | 0:31:44 | 0:31:47 | |
because it's a really good feeling when you've found someone | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
and located the right beneficiaries to the estate. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:54 | |
And as a result, it's spurred Eileen on | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
to find out more about her large and long lost family. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
I'm now trying to get in contact with the cousins I know of, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:06 | |
unfortunately they've all moved from the addresses that I had, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:10 | |
so that's another job that I've got to try and do now. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:15 | |
So I'm hoping that somehow they could get the other people | 0:32:15 | 0:32:19 | |
who are still surviving to be able to contact each other, | 0:32:19 | 0:32:24 | |
would be nice, so that we know where people are. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:27 | |
Right, do you know what family that was from? | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
On the £12,000 estate of Colin Maclennan, | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
heir hunting firm Celtic Research were trying to crack a case | 0:32:39 | 0:32:43 | |
that had lain unsolved for 26 years. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:45 | |
If an estate is unclaimed for 30 years, | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
it will pass to the government and it will become irrecoverable. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:52 | |
I knew that because Colin had died in 1989 | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
that deadline would be looming | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
and if no claim was made, the government would keep the money. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:01 | |
Colin had passed away on the 23rd of April, 1989. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:06 | |
But it was his illegitimate birth to domestic servant Mary Maclennan | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
that was causing headaches for Hector. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:13 | |
Many girls who had no other skills went into domestic service. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
They would sometimes fall pregnant | 0:33:17 | 0:33:19 | |
and illegitimate births would then ensue. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:21 | |
Because Mary had been just 15 when Colin was born, | 0:33:22 | 0:33:26 | |
it was possible he'd been given up for adoption. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:29 | |
If we think that there's an adoption, | 0:33:29 | 0:33:31 | |
we have to find out either way whether it's a legal adoption | 0:33:31 | 0:33:35 | |
or an informal adoption. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:36 | |
When Hector searched adoption records, nothing came up. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:39 | |
This meant that any heirs to Colin's estate | 0:33:39 | 0:33:42 | |
would come from his mother Mary's family. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
In order to find out what happened to Mary, | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
we looked for her marriage from the date of birth of the deceased, | 0:33:48 | 0:33:51 | |
we looked under all spelling variants throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
and we were lucky enough to find one marriage to a Farquhar Maclennan, | 0:33:55 | 0:33:59 | |
and through that information, from the marriage certificate, | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
we were able to find her in the 1911 census living in Scotland. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:07 | |
Mary and Farquhar married in February 1938 | 0:34:08 | 0:34:12 | |
in a register office in London. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:14 | |
But the marriage also revealed a remarkable detail. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:18 | |
Both Farquhar and Mary had been born with the same surname. | 0:34:18 | 0:34:22 | |
It's unusual for somebody to marry somebody with the same surname | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
and that may bring up the question of whether they are marrying | 0:34:25 | 0:34:29 | |
someone that they are related to, but that's not necessarily the case. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
And in the case of Farquhar and Mary, | 0:34:33 | 0:34:35 | |
it seemed it was pure coincidence. | 0:34:35 | 0:34:38 | |
But the big question was whether the couple had any children | 0:34:38 | 0:34:41 | |
who would be Colin's half siblings. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:43 | |
Hector began the search. | 0:34:43 | 0:34:45 | |
The obvious place to start was in London | 0:34:45 | 0:34:47 | |
because that's where they got married | 0:34:47 | 0:34:49 | |
and unfortunately we couldn't find any there. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:51 | |
In fact, we couldn't find any in all of England and Wales. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
So I thought, as she was from Scotland, | 0:34:54 | 0:34:57 | |
perhaps she went up there to have additional children. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
Hector's hunch turned out to be spot-on. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:02 | |
When we looked in Scotland, we found that she had four children. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
Hector found that between 1940 and 1946, | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
Farquhar and Mary had three sons and a daughter called Chrissie. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:14 | |
Having found a number for her, Hector got straight on the phone, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:18 | |
knowing it could be a delicate call. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
Making sensitive calls to potential heirs is part of our daily routine | 0:35:20 | 0:35:25 | |
and this has to be dealt with some tact, | 0:35:25 | 0:35:27 | |
particularly because some of the information that we're going to be | 0:35:27 | 0:35:30 | |
sharing with that person may not be something | 0:35:30 | 0:35:32 | |
that they'll be pleased to hear. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:34 | |
It just dropped like a bombshell. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:38 | |
I was just...I couldn't believe it. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
I said, "No," I said, "you must be making a mistake." | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
Until the call from Hector, | 0:35:45 | 0:35:47 | |
Chrissie had had no idea about her half-brother Colin. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:51 | |
I felt sad because I wanted to see what he looked like, | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
what sort of person was he, you know, and I was really... | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
Oh, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
You know, I went to bed that night, | 0:36:00 | 0:36:02 | |
and even now I'm still thinking about him, I still can't... | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
you know, I can't get over it. It's amazing. | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
It was a secret her mum Mary had taken to the grave. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:11 | |
She never mentioned Colin, never at all. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:14 | |
But I know that she used to go off to have little holidays | 0:36:14 | 0:36:17 | |
what I thought was, you know, going... | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
I never would've thought where she was... | 0:36:20 | 0:36:22 | |
Never said, really, where she was going or who she was seeing. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:26 | |
But she just used to go off for a few days | 0:36:26 | 0:36:28 | |
and I do have a feeling she was probably...she knew where he was. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
Chrissie and her mum Mary were very close. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
My mother was absolutely amazing. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
She was an amazing lady. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
She was very gentle, | 0:36:39 | 0:36:41 | |
very kind and she always would do wonderful food for everyone. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:46 | |
Whoever came in the house, she'd always put a spread up for them. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:50 | |
She loved to cook, she was a wonderful cook. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:53 | |
But discovering what had happened to her mother at just 15 | 0:36:53 | 0:36:58 | |
has been hard for Chrissie. | 0:36:58 | 0:36:59 | |
Oh, my mum was so young, it must've been a difficult time for her | 0:36:59 | 0:37:04 | |
because she was so lovely and it was hard, it must've been really hard, | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
she wouldn't have known what to do because she was just a child. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
It was frowned upon, you know, to be pregnant at such a young age. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:16 | |
Knowing the truth has helped Chrissie | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
to better understand her mum. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:22 | |
In my mum, I did see sadness | 0:37:22 | 0:37:24 | |
because she used to warn me all the time when I was growing up | 0:37:24 | 0:37:29 | |
because she used to say to me, "No, don't marry or don't go with that," | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
and, "Be careful what you're doing," because she knew the hardship | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
of you going to a wrong relationship. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
And Christie believes her mum's experience as a teenager | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
had a big impact on her throughout her life. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
And when she came back from the Lake District, you know, | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
she'd go into her bedroom and she was private, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:51 | |
but very private, you know. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:53 | |
Keep herself to herself. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:55 | |
I don't think she wanted to burden us with it. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:58 | |
After 26 years, | 0:37:59 | 0:38:01 | |
it seemed Hector had finally solved the case of Colin Maclennan | 0:38:01 | 0:38:05 | |
and all he had to do now was help his heirs claim their inheritance. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:10 | |
Well, he was entitled to a share in an estate which we were researching. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:16 | |
But there was about to be a sudden and unexpected twist. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:20 | |
We made a claim on behalf of Chrissie and her surviving siblings. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:23 | |
Unfortunately, the government legal department rejected the claim. | 0:38:23 | 0:38:27 | |
It was a bombshell for Hector. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
The department didn't think | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
there was enough evidence to back up the claim. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
We could not prove that the Mary Maclennan | 0:38:34 | 0:38:36 | |
who was the mother of Chrissie was the same Mary Maclennan | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
who was the mother of the deceased, Colin. | 0:38:39 | 0:38:42 | |
Having been tantalisingly close to completing the case, | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
everything was now in jeopardy. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:47 | |
But Hector wasn't about to give up that easily | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
and set about proving the connection. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
I tried to compare the signatures between the mother | 0:38:53 | 0:38:56 | |
that was listed on Colin's birth certificate | 0:38:56 | 0:38:59 | |
and the mother listed on Chrissie's birth certificate. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
To my untrained eye, they looked almost exactly the same. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
However, the challenge was to prove | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
that they were both written by the same person. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:12 | |
Today, Hector is on his way to get an expert opinion. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:21 | |
I'm meeting a handwriting expert, | 0:39:21 | 0:39:22 | |
and I'm going to be taking the birth certificates that I have on the case | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
for her to look at and hopefully, | 0:39:25 | 0:39:27 | |
through her expertise and through her experience, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:29 | |
she'll be able to confirm that the signatures that we have | 0:39:29 | 0:39:32 | |
for the mother of the deceased and the mother of our heirs is the same. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:36 | |
Graphologist Emma Baich is able to offer a detailed analysis | 0:39:36 | 0:39:40 | |
of a person's handwriting and Hector is keen to know | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
if she agrees with his opinion on Mary's signature. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
I have a hunch and I'm hoping you'll be able to confirm my hunch, | 0:39:47 | 0:39:51 | |
which is that two people share the same mother - | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
the deceased and what I believe to be his half-sister, Chrissie. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:59 | |
This is the copy of the deceased's birth certificate, | 0:39:59 | 0:40:05 | |
with his mother signing it. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:07 | |
She would have been about 30 when she had Chrissie | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
and I believe that she signed this document. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:14 | |
And maybe you can tell me whether the signatures that we have taken | 0:40:14 | 0:40:18 | |
from the original registers | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
match the same person. | 0:40:20 | 0:40:23 | |
OK, let's have a look. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
Obviously, 15 is quite a young age anyway, | 0:40:25 | 0:40:28 | |
whether it's having a child or not, | 0:40:28 | 0:40:30 | |
so there will be quite a few changes between being a teenager and 30s. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:34 | |
If I was to play devil's advocate, | 0:40:34 | 0:40:36 | |
can you tell me what the differences are between the two signatures? | 0:40:36 | 0:40:39 | |
The way she's actually signed it is different. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:41 | |
She's written her full name here and here, she's just put M Maclennan. | 0:40:41 | 0:40:45 | |
This has been written more speedily than that one. | 0:40:45 | 0:40:48 | |
There's more hesitation there | 0:40:48 | 0:40:50 | |
and there is altogether more feeling of formality. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
However, I can see immediately | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
that there are similarities in that she has | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
quite a long starting stroke here on both of the Ms. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:03 | |
This is a little bit straighter. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:05 | |
Also the L, she does a very obvious rounded loop to the L, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:10 | |
which she does here as well. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
Handwriting does change, obviously, | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
from almost hour to hour depending on how you feel. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:19 | |
However, your main characteristics are unlikely to change | 0:41:19 | 0:41:22 | |
unless you've had traumas in your life. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
Although it could be said that having a child | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
at a very young age yourself is a form of trauma. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
Well, given the information that you have before you, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:35 | |
what would your conclusions be? | 0:41:35 | 0:41:37 | |
Well, my conclusions would be | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
that she was feeling very differently about her situation | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
and really her personality was different | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
at different times of her life. | 0:41:46 | 0:41:48 | |
However, I believe it is the same person, | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
simply because there are so many characteristics | 0:41:51 | 0:41:54 | |
that would be extremely difficult to forge. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
I would say, yes, this has been written by the same person. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:00 | |
Well, I'm very pleased with Emma's conclusions. | 0:42:02 | 0:42:05 | |
I think we're both agreed that it is the same person, | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
signing the same signature for a birth certificate | 0:42:08 | 0:42:11 | |
at two different stages in her life. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:13 | |
After the initial rejection, Hector resubmitted the claim, | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
arguing that the handwriting on both documents was from the same person. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:21 | |
Having demonstrated that the two signatures | 0:42:21 | 0:42:23 | |
were written by the same person, | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
we were able to prove the claim to my immense relief. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:28 | |
It was a great result for Hector and the team | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
and meant he had finally solved the case. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
Cases that have been unsolved for nearly a quarter of a century | 0:42:33 | 0:42:36 | |
or more present a real challenge for any genealogist. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:40 | |
So I like to pride myself on being able to solve cases like that, | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
because there's nothing more satisfying. | 0:42:43 | 0:42:46 | |
But for heir Chrissie, | 0:42:46 | 0:42:47 | |
the discovery of her half-brother is the start of a whole new chapter. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:52 | |
I would love to do research into Colin. | 0:42:52 | 0:42:54 | |
I would really love to know more. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
I just wish I'd met him and I really mean that. | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 |