Chase/Wilson Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters uncover a colourful past...

The bearded priest is unidentified -

and, of course, it's Frederic.

..tainted with moments of sadness.

And I think he blamed himself for what happened.

For the deaths of two of the children, yeah.

Whilst on another case, the team are tested to the limit.

As a researcher, there's only one thing worse than a commonly

occurring surname, and that's when someone with that surname

marries someone else with a commonly occurring surname.

It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters.

Some cases reveal the most fascinating

facts about a family's history.

His personal life was quite tragic, in some ways.

It would seem that the marriage didn't work out.

And delving deep can uncover long-forgotten family secrets.

So, this is the case of Geoffrey Elliot Wilson.

It's the case file from upstairs, so let's have a look.

When Fraser & Fraser took on the case of Geoffrey Wilson,

they quickly realised it could be a valuable estate to work.

When we started looking into the case of Geoffrey Elliot Wilson,

it became apparent pretty quickly

that the deceased owned his own property,

which means there is going to be good value for us to work the case.

Based on the property values in his road, in Peacehaven,

we think the property could be in the region of about £280,000.

The hunt was on -

and the first thing case manager Ben and his team

needed to do was establish some basic information about Geoffrey.

So, one of the first things we all do when we're

looking into a case is contact neighbours, to see if they had

any knowledge of the deceased which can help us out with our research.

Geoffrey Wilson died in East Sussex on the 27th of May, 2016.

For years he shared his house with his mother, Mary,

and he continued living there after she died in 2014.

Neighbour Maureen Madden found Geoffrey to be a nice

and friendly man.

I've lived across the street from Geoffrey for seven years now.

He was a very good neighbour. A very quiet man.

He looked after his mother when we moved here first.

She lived with him.

Sadly, she died about two or three years ago and he was on his own.

And we used to talk to him, and ask him how he was getting on.

So he was a very good neighbour, yes.

There are no known photographs of Geoffrey,

and Maureen says he generally kept himself to himself.

Geoffrey was a very quiet, private man,

but very pleasant to talk to.

He had a sweet little face. He had nice twinkly eyes.

He used to go to a pub in Newhaven, by the river there.

He used to go there regularly,

so I guess it was a pub where sailing people met.

But although Geoffrey may have been reserved,

his absence has certainly not gone unnoticed.

Quiet, sincere.

A gentleman. I think he's missed from seeing him around.

He was part of the community, though he didn't do things with people.

He was somebody who was there.

We used to enjoy our little chats with him.

And as I said, he will be missed in the street,

because he was a good neighbour.

So we're sorry that he's gone.

In the office, Ben had been able to glean some valuable

information from Geoffrey's neighbours.

We've soon discovered that he was never married, had no children.

Next, the team had to find out if Geoffrey had any siblings.

Geoffrey Elliot Wilson was born the 22nd of October 1949 in Hackney.

The son of Leslie Percy Wilson and Mary Wilson, nee Towerzey.

They married in 1940, in Barnet,

had one other child, a Gillian Lesley Wilson.

If Gillian was still alive,

she would be the sole heir to Geoffrey's estate.

But sadly, that wasn't the case.

She predeceased in 2010.

So, that's the point where we decided to go back on the paternal,

maternal lines of the family.

But early signs weren't good.

There are no heirs on the paternal side of the family.

Erm, the deceased father was an only child.

This meant the team's chances of finding heirs were immediately

halved, and all hopes now rested on Geoffrey's mother and her family.

Mary Towerzey was born in 1918, in Islington.

She was the daughter of an Ernest Towerzey and Edith Bunn Marshall.

Erm, they married in 1896, in Colchester.

The next question for the team

was whether Ernest and Edith had any more children.

So, the maternal grandparents had a number of other children.

The deceased's mother was actually the youngest in the family.

The eldest daughter was a Mabel Victoria Towerzey,

born in 1897. Next, there was an Ernest Howard Towerzey,

who was born in 1903 in Southwark.

Then there was Elisabeth Maude Towerzey, born 1906 in Shoreditch.

John Towerzey, born 1908 in Shoreditch.

Thelma Towerzey, born in 1914.

And Jack Towerzey, born in 1915.

Ben was quickly able to rule out one stem,

as Mary's brother, Ernest, had died a bachelor.

However, research suggested that Mary's remaining five siblings

all married, and had children.

A child, other than the deceased's mother, was Jack Towerzey.

He married a Kathleen Denney in 1939 in Billericay,

and had one son. Next, there was a Thelma Towerzey.

She married a Sydney Nichols in 1934 in Islington. They had one child.

The team had made a flying start to the research,

but their hunt for heirs was about to be thrown off course.

So, when we started to research the stem of Mabel,

that's when our problems really started.

Mabel Victoria Towerzey was born in 1897 in Colchester.

She married a Frederic Charles Harrington in 1915 in Pancras.

The couple married during the First World War, and at the time,

Frederic was serving with the second Battalion London Irish Rifles.

Frederic's had quite a complex war.

He's had four months on the Western Front at Vimy Ridge.

He's then served in Salonika for probably five months.

And then he is sent out to the Far East, he's been in Egypt,

and fought his way through Palestine against the Turks.

So he's had a whole series of tough campaigns.

It seems the toll of fighting in so many battles over such

a sustained period proved too much for Frederic,

and he was discharged nine months before the end of the war in 1918.

He would have been exposed to artillery bombardment, machine guns,

sniper fire, and that slowly erodes your capacity to cope.

It uses up your mental energy.

To cope with life in the trenches, the men developed strong bonds,

and would often use faith to guide them through their darkest moments.

The common mechanism is prayer, because it's a dialogue with God.

It distracts you from what might happen,

and it appears to confer some protection.

But for men like Frederic,

the horrors of the trenches were compounded by new types of warfare.

Gas was the new horrific weapon of the First World War.

It was considered inhumane, terrifying, a misuse of science,

and so the post-war narrative tends to be dominated

by the use of chemical weapons.

And so any veteran who isn't functioning well -

who has some medically unexplained illness -

tends to have that attributed to the effects of gas.

It's believed Frederic was one of the many men

to suffer from gas poisoning.

However, that may not fully explain the reason for his discharge.

In February 1918, he is described as being medically unfit,

he is evacuated to the UK, and is put on light duties.

And that kind of suggests a diagnosis of shell shock.

One way they'd cope with their distress is to somatise it,

to convert it into a physical symptom.

So it's very common in the '20s and '30s for veterans to suffer

from stomach cramps, indigestion, chest pain - they are the

classic symptoms of shell shock in the interwar period.

Despite the traumatic effects of his time on the front line,

Frederic had survived the war,

and as the heir hunters were about to discover,

he and wife Mabel went on to have more children.

We conducted a birth search from that marriage,

and found seven potential children.

But as the team started looking into these children,

they made a tragic discovery.

We realised that Monica and Moya had passed away in infancy.

Moya Harrington was born in 1921, and passed away in 1923,

and Monica was born in 1924, and died in 1925.

It's always quite sad when we discover tragic infant deaths

in the cases that we work.

In this case, there were two that died,

and they were not even four years old. So, very sad for us,

and, obviously, we don't know the situation at the time.

Ben now turned his attention to the remaining children,

and was able to make quick progress.

One of them was still alive,

and there were two other siblings that she had,

who had passed away that left children.

There was a Patrick, who was the eldest.

Patrick Harrington, who married a Winifred Edwards.

And then there was an Eileen Veronica Harrington,

who married a Hall.

The team were also able to rule out Francis, who had died a bachelor,

which just left the stem of Wilfred to crack.

But there was an issue with the seventh child, Wilfred Harrington.

We couldn't find any record of him alive, or having married,

or having passed away.

Although Wilfred was listed on the census, the fact there was

no other trace of him was a concern for the team,

but ordering in a key document would prove invaluable.

So we purchased the birth certificate, and we realised

that he was actually Wilfred Besant.

What happened was, is that Mabel went on to have another child

with a Wilfred Besant.

It was a surprising development,

as Mabel was still married to Frederic Harrington,

and it posed some problems for the team.

Children born out of wedlock is quite unusual, but it does pop up

every 30 to 40 cases that we look into.

And it's a real headache for us, because we need to identify

who they are, and where they belong in our family tree.

The team now wondered how many more children Mabel had had

with Wilfred Besant.

They started by scrutinising the birth certificate

of Wilfred and Mabel's son.

On the birth certificate, what we have, first of all,

when and where they were born.

So in this case, it's the 21st of March, 1929 in St Pancras.

And we have his full name, which is Wilfred.

We have the name of his father, which is Wilfred Besant.

And the name and surname and maiden name of mother.

In this case, we have Mabel Victoria Harrington,

formerly Towerzey, a restaurant waitress.

Then it goes on to list the occupation of Wilfred's father,

and that is of a hotel waiter.

And as the team dug deeper into Mabel's relationship

with Wilfred Besant, the case entered a new dimension.

The bombshell in this case was that Mabel Towerzey had six children

by Mr Harrington, and then went on to have three further children

by Wilfred Besant.

With the family tree turning into a web of increasing mystery,

would the team ever be able to find the rightful beneficiaries?

When the heir hunters take on a case estimated to be

close to half a million pounds, the stakes are always high.

You know, if we can get the chance to come and see you,

and take you through some of the family history,

that would be really good.

Today, the race is on to track down and sign up the heirs

to a potential £419,000 fortune.

He hasn't signed with any competition as yet.

In the London offices of heir hunting firm Finders International,

the team is working at full speed as three new cases have come in.

Today, there's been quite a few ads on the BB lists today.

Now, I've had one in with the name of Carol May Chase.

Now, she passed away in October this year.

Now, we know that she owned her property when she passed away,

and we know that she was married.

Her maiden name was Hughes. So, initially, when we picked up

this case, it could be quite a tricky one with that surname.

Carol May Chase, who was a widow, died on October 1st, 2016, aged 76.

She passed away in a hospital close to her home in Wallasey.

As I'm going out about ten to eight, the ambulance came down the road.

And another neighbour who saw her said

"Well, we don't know what it was all about".

She walked into the ambulance. He then got a phone call to say

they were moving her to Broad Green, and she died that night.

So it was all very sudden, and it was a shock.

Although she'd not lived in the area long,

Carol had become the life and soul of the local community,

and is remembered fondly for her love of life.

She'd been up here for just on two years, and had joined

a tap-dancing group, pilates, and she'd always done

Scottish country dancing, so she joined a group here.

She used to go off to Scottish balls, and what have you.

Yeah, very active and talkative, to say the least.

And Carol also kept an interest in her former work as a teacher.

One of the ladies who'd been at Saint Edmund's with her said

she was a great one for reunions.

So she always went to their school reunions.

Carol owned this house on the Wirral, and with an estimated value

of £419,000, the team know this is a major case

that will attract the competition. They need to work fast.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a increased sense of pressure

and priority when we think a case is going to be more valuable.

Obviously, this means that not only we stand, as a company, to earn

more money on the signatures we obtain from the beneficiaries.

And no-one is feeling the pressure more today

than case manager Suzanne,

who is trying to piece together the history of Carol's life.

She previously lived in Plymouth with her husband.

Unfortunately, her husband passed away in Plymouth,

and it looks like she then moved back up to where she was from

in Wallasey, and bought a property there.

Initial investigations suggest that after the death of her husband,

she probably had very few ties to the Plymouth area.

Her and her husband didn't have any children,

so this means we're having to look at whether she had

any siblings at all.

So we found that she was an only child, so we've had to look

at both maternal and paternal families.

Now, we've taken a look into the maternal family.

The surname's Glennie, so that looks very good to work with.

However, there's just one sibling of the deceased mother.

Now, he passes away quite early on, so he's only 23 when he passes away.

There's no heirs on that side at all.

Turning her attention to the paternal side,

Suzanne is struggling to tie down the right family.

We're looking into the Hughes family. Now, it's proving to

be quite difficult, as the deceased's father,

he's born in 1912. Now, this means that we can't

find his family on the census. Luckily, I've picked him up

on the 1939, which has given me his parents' names,

and a brother and a sister. So, that's really a great start.

Making progress, Suzanne has established that Walter's parents

were Frederick Hughes and Amy Pritchard.

We're doing a Hughes and Pritchard birth search in Birkenhead.

Now, that's throwing up loads and loads of possibilities.

There's actually one with the first name Frederick,

and one with the first name of Amy. Now, the parents' names

are both Frederick and Amy, so initially, when you first

see those names, you think, "They're both their children".

But looking more closely at the birth register, it's clear

to Suzanne they were only born three months apart, so can't be siblings.

With the estate estimated at close to half a million pounds,

rival companies will also be racing to find heirs,

so Suzanne needs to decide which line to eliminate,

and which to focus on.

Making the wrong choice could spell disaster.

With the pressure on, Suzanne makes her decision.

Amy dies a spinster quite early on, so I think I'm just going to go

with Frederick's line and just wait for the certificate,

and just hope that it's right.

And the arrival of Frederick's birth certificate

shows Suzanne's decision was right.

Had a possible Amy or Frederick They're both born in the

same year, and both parents were named Amy and Frederick

-OK.

-So we've got that one back, and

that's incorrect, so we definitely know that this line's right.

Suzanne has managed to establish that Carol's father, Walter,

was the eldest child born to Frederick and Amy Hughes.

His sister Emily's death as an infant has brought

her stem to a close. However, Walter's

three other siblings, Frederick, Stanley and Dorothy,

could have had children.

These would be cousins and heirs to Carol's estate.

All right, thank you. Bye-bye.

Just as they're making progress, a new twist spells disaster

as they try to descend Dorothy's stem.

She marries a Jones.

So I've picked up the marriage to a Leonard Jones in 1940 in Wallasey.

So that's a Hughes-Jones birth search,

which is impossible. There are so many in that area,

and it's really close to Wales, as well.

Hughes and Jones are the most common names in Wales.

If Suzanne has any chance of staying ahead of rival companies

on this high-value case, she has no alternative

but to continue down the more costly and time-consuming route.

It's simply impossible to really work without any certificates.

So it's a bit of a nightmare.

We're going have to order loads of certificates locally.

Now, we've got an agent who's already on his way

to go and pick up some certificates.

The certificates that we need to order are going to cost us

quite a lot of money in terms of the volume of documents we'll need,

and just in terms of the speed in which we find heirs,

it's going to be a lot longer than if that didn't occur.

So, hopefully, that can give us a bit of a head start.

But there's no guarantee that they'll make it

to the register office first.

Every year in Britain, thousands of people get a surprise

knock on the door from the heir hunters.

I was quite surprised, little bit shocked to find out

that I had a long-lost relative who's passed on.

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

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

I was surprised.

Very surprised.

But thousands of estates have eluded the heir hunters,

and remain unsolved.

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

Could you be the person the heir hunters have been looking for?

First is the case of Frank Laird, who died on July 22,

2013, in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

Born in Scotland, Frank is thought to have siblings living

in Australia. His estate was advertised by the Treasury's

Bona Vacantia Department but so far, no-one has come forward

with a valid claim.

Is there a chance you're related to Frank Laird?

Next is the case of Marion Elizabeth Alton,

who died March 20, 1987, in Salford, Manchester.

However, it's not known where or when she was born.

Marion was the widow of Frederic Alton,

and the name Alton has strong links with the counties of Lancashire,

Yorkshire, and Derbyshire.

Are you an Alton? Do you hold the key

to unlocking an estate that could be worth a fortune?

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

In London, heir hunters at Finders International

are in a nonstop race against rival companies

on the case of Carol Chase.

Her estate is worth close to half a million pounds,

and will have attracted the attention of the competition.

76-year-old widow Carol, from Wallasey,

had died unexpectedly in the autumn of 2016.

Full of life and active to the end, Carol left a lasting impression

on all who knew her.

She was a character, let's put it that way. She will be missed.

But I think it was the suddenness that shocked us all.

The team have had to act fast, and dispatch a travelling

researcher to get a number of records in person.

In the meantime, the search is gathering pace, as the team

look into the siblings of Carol's father, Walter.

-So we've got the certificates.

-OK, so now we can find more people

without having to do "Oh, I see a Hughes-Jones."

Dorothy's stem is on hold, as she married a Leonard Jones,

and it's impossible to work this line without documentation.

So the team turn their attention to Walter's brothers,

Frederick and Stanley. And a closer look at Frederick's

wife's name reveals a startling coincidence,

and another potential stumbling block.

Now, he actually marries a Jones, as well, so again

it's another Hughes-Jones birth search in the Birkenhead area.

He dies in Holywell in Wales, so it's all very close, I think,

and Jones in that...

Jones in Wales is simply impossible to work without certificates.

With Frederick and his sister Dorothy marrying Joneses,

pinning down the right heirs is going to be extremely tough.

But there's one more uncle left to research.

So the final stem on the Hughes side is Stanley Hugh Hughes.

Now, he passed away in '74.

Now, we're not sure if he married. There's three potential marriages.

I think I've ruled two of them out, linking to different

Stanley H Hughes, and I've gone with Regina Graham.

Now, she dies in 2005. I've ordered that death, as well,

in hope that the informant is listed and maybe there's

a daughter or a son.

So we'll be getting certificates all in today.

Our representative's gone down to the registry office to pick them up,

so we're hoping they'll be in hopefully around one or two today.

With time ticking, the pressure is on for the heir hunters.

The certificates are in, and it's all hands on deck as they pick up

the line descending from Frederick Norman Hughes

for a second time.

And the hard work is paying off,

as Suzanne makes a breakthrough, and finds two of Fred's daughters.

She quickly makes contact.

Your husband's brothers and sisters that are living,

and then also I'll see if I can find their children, as well.

For Suzanne, the information is vital in helping her establish

who Frederick and Lillian's children are ahead of the competition.

Now, out of the eight children,

one had passed away as an infant.

Frederick and Lillian, both named after the parents, passed away.

Frederic had five children, and Lillian had two children.

These certificates led us to crack a Hughes-Jones stem,

and locate 12 heirs.

With 12 beneficiaries stemming from Carol's uncle Frederick,

every precious moment counts if the team are to locate

them all, and sign them up before their rivals.

It's all hands on deck.

We know that any potential competition looking at it

are going to be putting more resources into it,

so we have to pull everyone together,

we have to fight harder, if you like, to get signatures

from the heirs and to find everybody in the quickest time possible.

Can I get you to take a look at a couple of stems for me?

With the end in sight, Suzanne still has to establish

if Carol's uncle Stanley and aunt Dorothy had children.

We ordered the certificate of Stanley's wife, Regina Hughes.

It came back into the office, and as the informant,

we though a family member was listed, so that was perfect.

We might do, hopefully.

But things aren't that straightforward, and the name

on the certificate is that of a family friend.

The team contact her in the hope she may have some knowledge

of the Hughes family.

She was actually able to provide us with a lot of family information.

Stanley and Regina had two boys,

Trevor and Glyn, and they'd both unfortunately passed away, as well.

So I think they were fairly, fairly young when they passed away.

They were only in their 50s.

But despite having died relatively young,

they both had one daughter each.

Today, travelling representative Parmjeet is on his way to visit

Deborah, who is Stanley and Regina's granddaughter,

and Carol's first cousin once removed.

Hello, Debbie, nice to meet you.

Let me just come in. Let me show you the family tree.

-OK.

-This is the family tree. It's a bit long!

-OK, we'll start from over here.

-OK.

-That's Carol, who's passed away.

Her dad was Walter Pritchard Hughes, and he was a brother

of your grandfather.

Your great-grandfather was Frederick, and then

he had one, two, three,

-four, five children.

-OK.

Out of one of those, one was an infant death,

and the other ones are... Some are surviving.

Those who are not their children are beneficiaries.

You can see we've got a number of beneficiaries there.

Your line is just the two, then we've got Dorothy,

who's got two, then we've got Frederick, who had eight children.

-Right.

-And out of those, Frederick's

passed away and he's got one, two, three, four, five children.

And Lillian's passed away, and they've got two children.

I don't know how much you knew about your family.

I don't know a lot on my dad's side at all, to be honest.

-Yeah.

-Because he died when he was 51,

and didn't really talk a lot about them, and I thought

it was just me. My dad passed away when I was...

27, and not long after, everyone else did, and then

I thought it was just me.

Shocked by the discovery of this new-found family,

Deborah tries to piece the puzzle together.

The relatives that I knew about were my dad, Glynn,

and my uncle Trevor, my nan, their mother,

and Trevor's daughter,

I knew her when I was at school. My dad, he had MS, and sadly

passed away when he was quite young, and Trevor passed away not long

afterwards, and then not long after him, my nan passed away.

With most of her close relatives gone, the call from Suzanne

caught her unawares.

It was a big shock when she started coming out with...

I mean, I'd never even heard of Carol.

The more she went into it, the more... It's exciting, isn't it?

It's just... mind-blowingly exciting

that something like this could happen, and, you know,

I get to discover there's more out there now.

But now Deborah's got over the initial shock, she and her family

are enjoying learning about the Hughes family tree.

My husband just thinks it's brilliant, and he's

really made up for me.

Can I keep a copy?

We'll send you another. This is an edited version only.

OK. Yeah.

But once we've finished it all, you'll be able to get a full copy.

Oh, brilliant.

Back in the office, all the loose ends are being tied up,

with 16 beneficiaries having been traced to Carol's estate.

We were able to get representatives out to see them,

and they all retained our services.

So that just shows, you know, how good it is to get

certificates in on the same day from registry offices.

And Suzanne's hard work means the world to heir Deborah.

It's made me want to find out loads more about my family.

I instantly started to look online at the time, and I really

successfully traced my mum's side,

way back to my great-great-grandparents, but

I've failed a bit on the Hugheses because it's a very popular name.

And in Liverpool, there's a lot of Hugheses.

What's happened now is a new lease of life, really, to try

and rekindle that family connection I have again.

You know, raise a toast to Carol. You know?

In London, the team at Fraser & Fraser

were trying to find heirs to the £280,000

estate of Geoffrey Wilson.

Do you know what? That's probably why we couldn't find him.

Research into Geoffrey's mother Mary's family had thrown up

a curveball for the team.

Mary's sister, Mabel Towerzey, had married soldier

Frederic Harrington in 1915, and they'd had six children.

But now it transpires she'd had more children with a man

called Wilfred Besant.

So when we discovered that Mabel went on to have another child,

Wilfred, we then thought,

"Maybe, did they have any other children?"

So we then used that combination of Besant to Towerzey

but we've had no trace, so we think, "Well, maybe she's

"playing around with her names," and in our experience this can

happen, so we've then just decided to have a shot in the dark,

and see if there's any Besant to Harrington births.

And we've got two in the same sort of area, in London City -

a Colin born in 1930, and a Mavis born in 1931.

But a key question remains - why had Mabel gone on to have

more children with Wilfred, while still married to Frederic?

Research into Frederic's remarkable life

would provide a possible answer.

From a young age, Frederic had been deeply religious,

and in his mid-teens, he took his faith in a new direction.

I think about 16 or 17, like some people at that period,

he converted to Orthodoxy,

and in those days there weren't many Orthodox Churches around,

so he was received at the Russian Orthodox Embassy Chapel

in London in 1897, so he became Orthodox then.

From 1899 to 1918, Frederic served in the Army, fighting in both

the Boer War and the First World War.

But after being discharged, it seems Frederic then

dedicated his life to his religion.

His Christian faith was something that was very important to him.

He was a good man, a man of prayer, a kind man,

who cared about other people.

During the 1920s, it's believed Frederic spent time

in Africa, spreading the word of the Orthodox Church.

He'd spent his childhood there, he'd spent his early youth there,

he'd worked there, and he clearly had a rapport with African people.

He also spent time in India.

When he was in India, there were people who needed to be

prepared for baptism, there were people who'd been converted,

and he was helping to assist them.

They were quite large numbers, so this was a task that he took on.

By the late 1920s, he returned to London, and became an

active member in what is now known as the British Orthodox Church.

The British Orthodox Church is a Church of the Orthodox tradition.

We've derived from the consecration of our first bishop

from Syria in 1866.

Our task is actually to bring orthodoxy to British people,

because we see orthodoxy as being universal.

Frederic was ordained, and set up his own mission to help

the poor of Islington.

He saw things on quite a sort of sensible scale -

he had the idea of missions going off, sort of

household services, people going round dealing with the problems

of poverty, and the area where he was in Islington,

in those days, was quite a sort of poor area.

His tireless work earned him a lasting legacy.

He was highly respected in the church, and although he'd

been dead long before I was born, people still spoke of him

with affection, and there were people who knew him personally.

Some people called him "The Poor People And Children's Bishop",

because he was seen around the streets in his robes.

But Frederic's worldwide travel seemed to take its toll

on his marriage.

His personal life was quite tragic in some ways.

It would seem that the marriage didn't work out, there were issues

there and so his wife left him and went off to live

with someone else. But he was a loving father,

and it's very interesting that his son Patrick

remained very close to him.

In the office, the heir hunters have made a sad discovery

about Frederic's wife, Mabel.

In 1934, her life had been tragically cut short.

She dies aged 37, she has seven children alive.

Mabel's early death was a potential problem for Ben and the team.

So around that time when Mabel passed away, if the father didn't

have the resources to look after the children or if the family

couldn't help out, the extended family, that is,

the children were probably put into care.

Ben's suspicions were soon confirmed.

When we find out that a family have been put into care,

it's more difficult for us to confirm our research.

They've obviously been disjointed over time,

they've lost contact, or they just have no knowledge about certain

events in their family or potential relations.

So...very difficult for us to research.

Despite this hurdle, the team were able to trace the descendants

of all of Mabel's children, and it wasn't long before they began

finding potential beneficiaries.

We've got children we've got there...

Three of them were Leslie, David, and Michael,

the children of Frederic and Mabel's eldest son, Patrick,

and when Ben delivered the news, it brought up some difficult memories.

I think it was to do with my grandmother.

Because my grandfather was away out of the country a lot of the time

when he was on business.

She got involved with somebody else, and had three further children.

It was all going on under the nose of my grandfather.

He didn't know, because he was away a lot in all sorts

of parts of the world.

Tragically, their father Patrick also remembered the deaths

of his two young sisters, Monica and Moya.

Two of the sisters died.

One was burnt, and the other one fell down the stairs.

And they was only one, three years old.

So very young, you know.

I get upset myself thinking about it, you know?

-Dad was looking after the children, really.

-Yes.

One of the older children, looking after the younger ones.

Yeah. And I think he blamed himself for...

For the deaths of two of the children, yes.

It seems this disruptive upbringing explains why Leslie

and his brothers had never heard of the deceased, Geoffrey Wilson.

The war and the break-up of our grandfather Frederic's family...

effectively broke the family into pieces, and we knew nothing

-about that side of it.

-Yeah.

-I suppose that's fairly common.

After a tricky search, Ben and the team had now managed

to locate a total of 23 heirs to the £280,000 estate

of Geoffrey Wilson.

The most important thing on the case of Geoffrey Wilson is that

we've reconnected the family.

Not only on the stem of Mabel, but generally

the whole family. And so it's going to be

an eye-opener for everyone once they have a copy

of that family tree.

And it's actually the church library as well, which is really good...

Yeah.

Hello. Welcome.

Lovely to see you.

But for Leslie, David and Michael, a new journey is beginning.

Becoming heirs has made them want to find out more about their ancestors,

especially their grandfather, Frederic.

And today, they've arranged to meet Seraphim.

The thing that also is important for us, of course -

we've got this pastoral staff, which is interesting because always

the tradition was that your father made it for Frederic.

-Yes.

-And, in fact,

it was interesting because it passed down, and my predecessor,

when he was consecrated as a bishop in 1944, he used it

on that occasion. And when I was made a bishop

in 1977, I also used it.

So it's been something that's been passed down.

-Was he skilled with sort of making things?

-He was a cabinet-maker.

Oh, he was a cabinet-maker? But I'm surprised he didn't carve it,

then, really, because, in a way...

And Seraphim has some interesting things to share.

Somebody wrote a book about a religious community that came

into the link with Frederic, but it didn't come to anything.

But there's a picture in it, and it says,

"The bearded priest is unidentified,"

and of course, it's Frederic.

Inside, he's annotated it in pencil.

This is the picture that, as I said, is the companion, and there's

-that one, as well.

-Oh, yeah, I've seen that one.

You've seen that one, yeah?

Meeting Seraphim has given the brothers the chance to connect

with the grandfather they barely knew.

-Super, lovely.

-Thanks very much.

It's been a very interesting visit.

He's provided a lot of answers to the questions

I've been having for years. I just can't imagine how he got

the time to do it all!

Going round the world, you know...

Different places. Just amazing.

I've learned so much, and one of the difficulties,

of course, is the more you know, the more you realise you DON'T know.

There's lots and lots of gaps, and lots more questions

but hopefully we can fill in some more of those gaps.