Smithers/Dippie Heir Hunters

Today, it's a case of deja vu for the Heir Hunters.

The more difficult side of the family,

the maternal side of the family, we'd already researched.

But a family of entertainers proves hard to track down.

When a family move around the country,

this makes it harder for us to place marriage,

birth and death records.

While on the case of a seaman,

it's all hands on deck.

Once we've established a case has value,

we know that the competitors are onto it straight away,

and there is that sense of a chase.

And the hunt for relatives goes global.

I did not find a death record for him anywhere in Scotland.

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

Put the address in the sat nav,

and it's brought us here.

In Cheshire, Heir Hunter Dave Beetham

is on his way to deliver some remarkable news.

Today's case is quite interesting,

I've never done one like this before.

Dave's on his way to see relatives of a lady called Pamela Smithers,

who died in 2015.

And incredibly, the people he's visiting are set to become heirs

for the second time in two years.

I'm going back to all the beneficiaries

to inform them that they're now what we call double beneficiaries,

because they're now going to inherit from two estates

instead of one.

This whole Massey side who are going to be beneficiaries of Pamela's estate.

So she's over here...

This unusual turn of events began back in 2013,

when the team at Finders International investigated

the challenging case of Florence Massey,

who had died in Southsea, Hampshire.

Now, this side of the family caused us a few problems

with the Massey surname,

some interchanging first names along the way.

You know, usual case like that shouldn't take us more than

a couple of months, but in fact it took us half a year,

to find all the heirs entitled on the Massey side of the family.

After months of difficult and complex research,

case manager Ryan Gregory eventually managed to track down

over 26 beneficiaries to the Massey estate,

and thought his work was done.

It was a really good case for us to crack,

we managed to contact all the beneficiaries

without coming across any competition.

But in spring 2016,

the solicitors looking after the estate contacted Ryan

with some surprising news.

One of Florence Massey's heirs, Pamela Smithers,

had already passed away without leaving a will,

and now the search was on for beneficiaries

to her £300,000 estate.

It's not unheard of, but...

it's a very rare situation that someone does become entitled

through another intestacy.

Pamela Smithers died at home in Peacehaven in East Sussex

on 22nd of February 2016, aged 89.

Her neighbour Mary had known her for over 40 years.

We used to sort of bump into each other as we walked down the road.

She was a great character.

Everybody seemed to like her, you know?

But she wasn't very good at keeping up relationships,

because there was no... after contact.

She was extraordinary when you met her, you know,

really cheerful and happy.

Pamela also had a passion for antiques and collectables.

She loved going to antique markets,

and finding all sorts of treasures of one kind or another.

She was absolutely... chock-a-block full of stuff,

all round, you know?

Anywhere, wherever there was a market going, she would be there.

SHE CHUCKLES

And even later on in her life,

when she wasn't able to carry things,

she would get the driver of the community bus

to collect them for her and pick them up, take them to her home.

But apparently in the past she got an auctioneer to come to her house

and look through her stuff,

and she was actually quite surprised that she had a painting

which was worth something like £5,000.

And she was thrilled about it.

SHE LAUGHS

Her love of antiques stemmed from a jewellery shop she'd owned

in Brighton, with her former husband.

I know that they broke up amicably, so that was OK.

And they used to write Christmas cards now and again,

well, every Christmas, but then it sort of petered out.

But I think she was very keen on her husband,

because she had a little photo of him tucked in the kitchen drawer,

you know, just sort of like that.

SHE CHUCKLES

So that she could whip it out, now and again, you know,

when she felt that she missed him.

SHE CHUCKLES

Which was rather sweet, I thought.

Yeah.

When Ryan and the team got the news that Pamela had passed away

without leaving a will, they were hopeful they had a head start.

When it came to researching Pamela's family tree,

we'd obviously already done the bulk of the complicated research

into her mum's family.

But they still had the other side of the family to research,

and Ryan was acutely aware

that although the case had been referred to them by solicitors,

there was still the risk that another firm could pick it up.

They had to work fast.

We were way ahead of anyone else that may look at it

because we'd researched one half of the family anyway,

and we were in a kind of key position,

given that we had a close relationship

with the administrating solicitors.

But we always have to push it through just in case, you know,

there's any other people that would pick up on it via other means.

First, Ryan needed to do some basic checks,

to see if Pamela had any immediate family.

-The old Massey case we did...

-OK.

I've spoken to Pamela's ex-husband, confirmed no issue.

I mean, I'm going to go over everything

and just make sure that no-one's moved.

Knowing that Pamela had been divorced,

the team were able to confirm that she'd never had any children.

They also needed to double check whether she'd had any brothers

or sisters.

In the old family tree we knew that Pamela was an only child,

but we would want to verify that again.

This kind of gets us to a position where we've ruled out

any close relatives of Pamela,

who would be entitled to inherit from her estate.

The team now knew they would be looking to the wider family,

and with a ready-made tree for Pamela's mother Gladys,

Ryan was feeling confident.

The more difficult side of the family,

the maternal side of the family,

we'd already researched,

and the good news for us and the office was that

we could then just focus research on Pamela's dad's side of the family.

But as the team began looking into Pamela's father,

Henry James Newbold,

would Ryan's confidence turn out to be misplaced?

So from our initial research,

Newbold seemed like quite a nice name.

It's not an overly common name,

however it is more common in the north than it is in the south.

We could place the deceased's father Henry James Newbold

on the 1901 and 1911 census.

The team needed to find out who Henry's parents were,

and whether they'd had any other children.

But they soon hit a stumbling block.

The initial stages of our research were delayed a little

just by the fact that the family did move around a lot.

It soon became clear why the family were moving around.

Pamela's grandfather was Henry Julius Newbold.

He'd been born in 1868,

but by the 1880s he was performing in travelling circuses

as Bon Bon, a comedic gymnast.

The idea of the acrobat is actually centuries-old.

Way before the advent of the actual circus itself,

which was popularised by Astley in 1768.

But the acrobat has been around for much, much longer than that.

The notion of a circus is that it's run by families,

so they were very much closed environments,

and the people that actually worked in the circus

were family members.

But the life of an acrobat was extremely tough.

With respect to actually the physical demands on the body,

it was pretty tough,

because they did all of the rigging.

They did all of the putting up of a tent which weighs 20 tonnes.

There was just a lot of work for them to do.

In modern circus, there are technicians that do all of that.

It also wasn't a very well-paid career.

In general, they didn't earn a great living.

If you're a superstar, or if you're really good at what you did,

then actually there was a living to be made, a much better living.

And more importantly, a better status.

But Bon Bon had a show stopping speciality.

Walking the tightrope.

The characteristics, say, for a tightwire walker,

but actually for a lot of acrobatics disciplines,

is an immense amount of focus.

Coupled with that is a huge amount of core strength,

and actually quite a lot of nerve.

Any audience members who would see a tightwire walker

for the first time,

would actually think that this guy was walking on water,

almost, you know?

How can he be balancing on something so narrow?

But tightrope walking was one of the most dangerous acts in the circus.

And on 15th of November in 1881,

Henry Julius Newbold hit the headlines after a horrifying fall.

Both the rope and the safety net had broken,

and Henry was lucky to escape with just a broken leg.

Kinds of tricks that they actually learned

were very much designed to stupefy,

it was very grand,

very much kind of like heart in your throat sort of moment.

It seems Henry's thirst for danger may have been inherited

from his own father, Henry Bellini, Pamela's great-grandfather.

Henry Bellini was also a tightrope walker,

and in 1873 he'd taken his skill to new extremes,

by walking across Niagara Falls in a breathtaking stunt.

The health and safety aspect back then was almost zero.

And they had to rely on each other.

So actually, there was quite a lot of danger involved

in being a circus acrobat.

Tragically, Henry Bellini's exploits would catch up with him,

and in 1888, he fell to his death during a stunt in London.

For the Heir Hunters,

the discovery that the Newbolds were travelling performers

meant the search for relatives of Pamela Smithers

was going to be much harder than anticipated.

When a family move around the country,

this makes it harder for us to place marriage, birth and death records.

With a £300,000 inheritance at stake,

were the team going to be able to track down all the heirs?

-PHONE RINGS

-Hello?

The search for heirs often reveals remarkable stories

about the person who has passed away.

We start with knowing sometimes literally a name

and a date of death,

and so you know absolutely nothing about what you're getting into.

And that was the case in 2015,

when London-based research firm Fraser and Fraser

took on the case of Peter Dippie.

Peter had died in Kelty, near Edinburgh.

So the case landed on the desk of Karen Johannesson,

who runs the company's Scottish office.

When you come across a surname like Dippie

on the list of unclaimed estates,

it's immediately interesting because you think well,

that's going to be quick to start.

The case had been advertised

by the Queen and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer,

which is Scotland's equivalent of the Bona Vacantia department.

With just some basic information about the deceased,

Karen had to try and establish the value of the estate.

It gave his address as being in Kelty,

and immediately I knew this was going to be worth pursuing

because...

even in an area like Kelty with relatively low property values,

it was a cottage standing on its own,

and it was definitely worth getting involved with.

A search of records showed that Peter owned his property,

which gave the estate an estimated value of £150,000.

With such a high value case to work,

and rival firms also likely to be interested,

Karen knew she'd have to move fast.

Once we've established a case has value,

we know that the competitors are onto it straight away

and there is that sense of a chase involved

to try to find the heirs,

and I must admit I really enjoy that part of the job.

That's what spurs us into doing the research quite quickly,

and it gives the job a real edge.

Peter Dippie was born on 21st of June 1937

in Dunfermline in Scotland,

and died just 15 miles away in Kirkcaldy in 2015.

-A bit eccentric.

-Mm.

Definitely a bit eccentric.

But likeable, I would say a likeable rogue, actually.

Alan and Bob met Peter seven years ago

when helping him restore his boat.

The three of them then became equal owners.

Got a skill set that allows us to do all the maintenance on the boat,

woodwork and engineering wise,

which Peter didn't have.

Once the boat was restored,

the three of them used to go out on weekend sailing adventures.

I think we brought a bit of happiness into his life, actually.

Aye. I think the last five or six years of his life

that he had that outlet, that he could come and...

know that he could go for a sail any time he wanted

without any worry about how am I going to cope,

how am I going to manage?

Peter was a former sailor, and loved every moment on his boat.

We'd go away on Friday nights, go down the river,

sit off of an island called Inchcombe Island,

and on nice nights you would just sit out on the deck,

and we'd sit and have a talk, and talk about his Navy days,

and talk about what we'd done with boats

and have a few drams, and they were great times,

-really good.

-Yeah.

-Really good times.

He was also renowned for tinkering in the garage.

Sometimes with questionable success.

-He would do things which were just downright dangerous.

-Yeah.

He converted his fire in his house to run on diesel.

He set it all up and he didn't really try it

and he left his mother in the house,

and the first time she went to light it,

she actually burned all her hair off,

all her eyebrows and front half of her hair got burnt off

when she tried to light the thing.

Yeah, he was a bit of a tinkerer.

Peter lived alone,

and along with Alan and Bob there was someone else he saw regularly.

Monday was haggis and egg.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday it was flame grilled chicken

with a chilli relish...

that I bought in specially for him because he liked it, so...!

You know. I made sure he was fed, anyway.

SHE CHUCKLES

Shona remembers Peter as someone she could always have a laugh with,

and enjoyed the banter as much as him.

He used to get on about the cups of tea.

"Oh, you're getting expensive for a cup of tea."

He would come out with all this twos, fives and ones,

you know? And he did it to wind me up.

You know, that was his cheeky nature.

For the last six years of his life,

he visited Shona daily, and she got to know him well.

When everybody was away, when I had finished serving,

he would come round and have a chat with me.

A lot of his stories were really good.

He took a lot of interest in engineering.

He was a really clever man.

Peter had suffered with health issues later in life,

but news of his death still came as a shock.

I was on holiday when he died,

but the day before I went on holiday,

he had just bought a brand-new car.

And he actually brought it up to let me see it,

and then he took ill just a couple of days after that and it never...

He never got it back out of the drive,

because he died in hospital after that.

Got the Dippie family in Kelty, but I think they've moved overseas.

As Peter hadn't left a will,

it was now up to the Heir Hunters

to try and trace heirs to his estate,

and Karen needed to start with the basics.

The first thing that I need to do, of course,

is to find Mr Dippie's birth certificate

and find out who his parents are.

I order up his death certificate and it said that he was a bachelor,

so that's fine.

I knew I didn't have to pursue that line.

Having ruled out a marriage or children,

Karen knew she might have to look to Peter's wider family,

in the hope of finding aunts, uncles or cousins.

But first, there was one more avenue to rule out.

I did want to find out if he had siblings,

so that's the first thing that I'm going to look at,

so from his parents' marriage certificate,

I can find out how old his parents were when they married,

how long do I need to search to find any brothers or sisters,

which areas should I be looking in?

And Peter's parents' marriage certificate

proved to be every bit as revealing as Karen had hoped.

William Dippie, aged 24, who lived at Admiralty Road in Rosyth,

so obviously involved in the Navy,

that's naval work.

And he married Peterina Davidson,

who was aged only 17 years old...

..and she was the daughter of Peter Davidson.

This is quite interesting, cos the name Peterina is...

It might sound unusual, to an English person.

In Scotland this is really common,

to give girls a boy's name with -ina on the end of it.

As Karen continued her research into Peter's parents,

she made the sad discovery that their married life

had been suddenly cut short.

William Dippie's death certificate was of some interest,

because...

tragically, it seems that he's died quite young.

Actually in HM dockyard at Rosyth,

so presumably whilst at work,

he appears to have dropped down, aged only 48 years old.

The death certificate revealed another tragic detail.

The informant was his son, Peter Dippie who,

if we go by the ages on here,

he's only 16 years old when he's informing on this.

My understanding is that legally you have to be 16 or over

to inform on any certificate,

so he's just old enough to be

a legal informant on his father's death.

It's rather sad.

Despite this tragedy in his young life,

in his early 20s,

Peter decided to follow in his father's footsteps,

and joined the Royal Navy.

He started his career as a stoker,

working out of the dockyards in Rosyth.

Peter Dippie was serving as a Petty Officer,

looking after the Marine engineering

in 1973 on Her Majesty's Ship Abdiel.

The following year,

we find that that ship and a small flotilla of French,

British and Navy ships are then assigned to the Suez Canal

to start clearing mines and unspent munitions,

plus the wrecks of ships, aircraft,

even tanks that had been put into the canal,

not only from the 1973 Yom Kippur War,

but actually commercial shipping had been limited

since the 1967 Six Day War,

so this was a major operation,

to clear one of the most important man-made waterways in the world.

And Peter had an integral role on board.

His work would have included boiler room maintenance,

which would have involved the removal and replacement

of pipe insulation.

In terms of maritime engineering,

Peter's role was servicing the ship,

and having specialist knowledge about the ability to lag pipes,

make sure that there's the integrity of heating systems,

making sure that energy is transferred

from one part of the ship to another,

so there's an element of technical skills there.

But it's also working with crews to maintain the ship,

perhaps a small group of men under his command

on specific tasks to make sure that repairs are done

in a good and orderly manner.

Having established that Peter had followed in the naval footsteps

of his father,

Karen needed to know what had happened to his mother, Peterina,

and if she had remarried, or had any other children.

On Peterina's certificate,

we established that she hadn't remarried,

so we were quite happy that there were no half blood issue

in this case.

But as Karen dug deeper,

the case of Peter Dippie would reveal the story of

an industrial tragedy that no-one had foreseen.

It was recognised that it could not be used safely,

and so by the end of the century,

it was outlawed completely in this country.

In the UK,

thousands of people each year

receive a surprising knock on their door from the Heir Hunters.

I found that amazing,

that I had that side of the family that they didn't know existed.

The Heir Hunters can fill in the gaps on a family tree,

reunite long lost relatives,

and hand over unexpected sums of money.

That's good news for you. You can order the Ferrari.

Well, hang on a minute, we haven't found the will yet!

LAUGHTER

But there are still many cases

that have eluded the Heir Hunters, and remain unsolved.

Today we have details of two estates that have yet to be claimed.

Are you the person the Heir Hunters have been looking for?

First is Ellen Kranitzky,

who passed away on 3rd of May 1992 in Basildon in Essex.

Her maiden name was Cooper,

and she married Herman Kranitzky in Old Street, London.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Second is the case of George Nelson Finneran.

He died on 13th of June, 1987 in Islington, north London.

Both estates were advertised on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list,

but so far, no-one has been linked to either family.

Can you help?

There's a surprise windfall waiting for someone.

So, it's back on that side of the family that we'd been looking into.

In London, the team at heir hunting firm Finders International

were experiencing a major case of deja vu.

They'd completed the case of Florence Massey in 2013,

but now one of Florence's heirs, Pamela Smithers,

had also died without leaving a will.

So she'd received some money already from an intestate relative,

and then for it to be happening again through the same family,

it's not unheard of, but it is a very rare situation.

The team had a head start in the search for heirs

to Pamela's £300,000 estate,

as they had a ready-made family tree for her mother, Grace.

But finding relatives through her father, Henry James Newbold,

was proving far trickier.

Have you got date of birth and date of death?

Henry had come from a long line of circus performers,

but the family's nomadic lifestyle

was making life difficult for the Heir Hunters.

They've managed to establish that Henry had four siblings,

but finding them to trace their descendants

was becoming a nightmare.

His brothers and sisters were born all over the UK,

from areas such as Leeds down to Lambeth in London,

so although we had the census,

and that's quite good for detailing where people are born,

it does become quite complicated...

..when people obviously move around a lot.

And Camilla's worst fears were realised

when she started looking into Henry's oldest sister Henrietta,

Pamela's aunt.

Henrietta Martha Newbold was born in 1889 in Leeds,

and we had her birth record.

However we were struggling to descend her line any further.

We couldn't find a marriage or a death

which would match Henrietta,

so we were considering that maybe she'd moved abroad.

It was a frustrating setback for the team,

who had no idea where to look for the elusive Henrietta.

So, it was important for us to speak to family members

and just confirm what happened to Henrietta

or any children that she may have had.

Undeterred, they turned their attention

to Henry's only brother, Edward,

and they finally managed to make a breakthrough.

Edward had married Lydia McMeeking in 1929,

and records revealed they'd had a son.

Armed with a number for this potential heir,

the team were ready to make the crucial call.

So, once we get to a stage on any case

where we get to speak to the first heir,

it's kind of a mixed bag of emotions, I think.

This is Camilla Price calling from a firm of heir hunters.

You know that that first conversation

could be the gateway to finding out a lot of information on the family.

It's a kind of key, pivotal moment in any case really.

OK, that's great, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.

We spoke to someone on Edward Julius Newbold's line,

who was a beneficiary to this estate.

It was great news for the team, and crucially,

the heir was able to give Camilla some valuable information.

He was able to tell us that he did have a cousin from Henrietta,

and that was someone that we now needed to look into.

We were unsure what marriage that was from, or who they could be,

but it was really important for us to now locate them.

Armed with this new knowledge,

the team were now able to work out what had happened to Henrietta,

and, true to family tradition,

she had travelled far and wide.

The first marriage was in South Africa

to a man called Richard Goetcher.

There was a first child from that marriage, who was born in the UK.

However, without knowing of that marriage,

we would never have found that child.

But that wasn't the only discovery Camilla made.

Henrietta moved back to the UK,

remarried under her married name,

rather than her maiden name,

and had another child.

The team were finally making progress,

and soon found a further three heirs from the stem of Pamela's aunt Emma.

That just left one aunt, Lillian, to trace,

and her stem would reveal another tale of daring and adventure.

We ordered the marriage certificate for a Lillian Newbold.

Lillian's son Kenneth was born in 1928,

and, after training as a design engineer in an aircraft factory,

he went to work on the record-breaking Bluebird jet-propelled car

that broke the world land speed record in 1964.

The fastest man on wheels sets a new world record.

Donald Campbell readies his Bluebird

on the sands of Lake Eyre in Australia

that is smoothed out for his assault on the speed mark.

Sadly, Kenneth died in an accident aged just 38,

but not before he had married and had children.

One of those children was Mallory,

and she wasn't expecting the call from the Heir Hunters.

I had been contacted by my niece, that's my sister's daughter.

Something about an inheritance and needing to speak to my sister.

And I thought I have no idea what this is,

we haven't got any, you know, surviving family

who could be leaving an inheritance.

Although Mallory never knew Pamela,

she has very fond memories of the family.

My grandmother was a very flamboyant person.

She dressed very brightly...

..and had an extremely loud voice.

She was very extrovert.

She always used to talk about...

..how good the ladies of the family, the girls of the family,

were at dancing, what wonderful legs we all had,

because of having been on the stage.

Being able to piece everything together,

and learn more about her family

has made Mallory determined to make sure

the information doesn't get lost again.

I think it's quite important for the next generation as well,

so my children who are in their 20s

and not particularly interested in family history.

But the thing is, by the time they are,

it may be too late to have these conversations,

and to find out about the past.

It would be really, really... enlightening for them,

and, of course, for their children in the future.

In the office, Ryan and Camilla had now managed to track down

all of the paternal heirs to Pamela's estate.

But there was still the maternal side of the family to wrap up.

Their previous research indicated there would be 26 heirs

on the Massey side.

It's quite unusual for us to be contacting

the same set of beneficiaries twice

from two separate estates within the space of a couple of years,

and in terms of contacting the beneficiaries,

it was really nice for us to be able to speak to them again

to tell them of this second windfall.

Ryan hasn't yet contacted all these double beneficiaries,

and today, he's dispatched travelling researcher Dave Beetham

to deliver the good news.

It will be interesting to see the reaction that we get.

Ryan has lined up seven visits for Dave in the area,

and one by one, he delivers the information

about their windfall.

Pamela Smithers?

Does that name ring a bell?

The final visit of the day is to Carol,

a cousin once removed.

The thing about this information is

you are not just a beneficiary from the estate of Florence Massey,

you're also a beneficiary from the estate of Pamela Smithers.

Gosh.

So, you're actually a beneficiary twice.

It's been a successful day for Dave.

It just shows you that the work that we do in one case,

that, the work, can be used again in another case.

Another of the double heirs to receive the surprise news

is Carol's brother, Peter, who lives in Cheshire.

Well, when I became an heir the first time, it was a bit of a shock.

And to have a second call was quite...

..outstanding, really.

The name Pamela Smithers didn't ring a bell straight away,

but I asked my wife, I mentioned the name to her,

and she recognised the name straight away.

We got the family tree out and we found,

or she went to read and found the name straight away,

and pointed to Gladys Beatrice Armstrong,

and Henry James Newbold.

They...were her mother and father.

Gladys Beatrice Armstrong was the younger sister

of my paternal grandfather James Foulkes Lowe,

and that's how the connection comes about.

It hasn't changed things a great deal, really.

It is not just the money that counts...

but it is the thrill, if you like, of actually...

being...an heir.

It's not like winning the lottery,

but it's just a good, satisfying experience.

It is a shame that you never know these people,

but that's the way it goes, that's life.

For Ryan and the team, it's been a successful case,

and they found a total of 30 heirs,

who'll each inherit a share of Pamela's £300,000 estate.

But for Mallory, the call from the Heir Hunters

has yielded more than just money.

It really sort of sets my life in that history,

and I'd forgotten all of this.

I haven't looked at these photos for 25, 30 years.

And it was only sort of searching through, you know,

a drawer of odd photos that I came across them,

and I thought, yes, I do remember all of this,

I do remember the family history about music halls

and the stage and performing.

And it sort of connects us... back in time, really,

to history that would be forgotten, if this hadn't happened.

In Edinburgh, Fraser and Fraser were on the hunt for beneficiaries to

the £156,000 estate of Peter Dippie,

who had died in Scotland in 2015.

I've got some photographs to give you of the family,

I don't know if you'd be able to help us to find out

who any of the people are?

Case manager Karen Johannesson

had discovered that Peter had been born in Dunfermline in 1937,

and followed in the footsteps of his father, William,

by joining the Royal Navy.

In later life, Peter's job also became his hobby

as he bought and restored a boat with friends, Alan and Bob.

I think we was very grateful, the fact that we took the boat on.

And he was able to get out and get a lot of use out of it.

When Peter's health began to deteriorate in later life,

his boating buddies did their best to look out for him.

You worried about him because at times you wouldn't see him for two

or three weeks. He'd never answer his phone.

We actually bought him a mobile phone...

but he just kept losing it.

The cause of Peter's ill health

seemed to go back to his time in the Navy.

Peter was part of a team responsible for refitting ships

when they were in the dockyard.

And in the late 1950s and early '60s,

his work put him in contact with an extremely dangerous material.

Asbestos, which was known for a long time

as the magic mineral,

has been known for many years

for its qualities of fire resistance.

So it's introduced around the end of the 19th century,

increasingly used during the 20th century for insulation purposes.

It's only really in the second half of the 20th century

that the full health impact of asbestos becomes apparent.

The Royal Navy started using asbestos for fireproofing

and thermal insulation.

It was really in the early 1940s

that it became very widely used.

In the late 1930s,

a process called limpet spraying was introduced,

where asbestos mixed with concrete and water was sprayed,

and so the levels of exposure in those circumstances

were really very high.

When Peter joined the Navy,

the dangers of asbestos weren't known,

but by the 1960s,

the full extent of the risks began to emerge.

The consequence of asbestosis is that the lungs,

as they become increasingly scarred,

become increasingly stiff,

and that makes it increasingly difficult for him to breathe.

With the demonstration of lung cancer,

and particularly mesothelioma,

it was recognised that it could not be used safely

and so, by the end of the century,

it was outlawed completely in this country.

But that was all too late for Peter,

who went on to contract asbestosis.

It was a painful and debilitating illness,

and sadly, Peter died in hospital aged 78.

In the office,

Karen was searching for living relatives

who could inherit Peter's estate.

And she was trying to establish whether he'd had any siblings.

Looking at the marriage certificate, William Dippie is 24,

and Peterina is 17.

They've obviously got married when she was very young.

And so, from that, I'm going to guess that they had

more than one child,

and it's really important to do an issue search

to find out who Mr Dippie's brothers and sisters were.

And Peter's unusual surname made Karen's life relatively easy.

So, a birth search in Scotland,

we can go directly to the indexes,

and we would just simply look every year

for everyone with the surname Dippie.

And with that surname,

I don't need to restrict my area because it's so unusual,

and I knew that anybody that I picked up would be almost certainly

part of this family.

And, sure enough,

a search through the birth indexes quickly paid off.

That's what led me to the birth of Peter's brother, William.

Karen was able to confirm that William was Peter's only brother.

He was born in 1930, and, like his father and brother,

he joined the military,

and became a Sergeant in the Army.

But while Karen had found a record of William's birth,

she couldn't find any record of marriages, or his death.

Given that he was born in 1930,

I thought it was unlikely he was still alive.

But I did not find a death record for him

anywhere in Scotland.

With a career in the Army,

Karen suspected William may have been stationed abroad,

which might explain why he wasn't showing up in any searches.

As we found on this case, people may be born in Scotland,

and then leave, and go we don't know where.

They may emigrate to anywhere in the world,

and then we have to use other ways of finding them,

particularly when they've got married surnames.

With William potentially anywhere in the world,

Karen needed a stroke of luck,

and fortunately, she got one.

I had a look to see if he had married,

and he actually married in Hong Kong,

but luckily for my research,

it was registered as a consular record here in Scotland,

so I was able to see that he had married

Simone Ledig in Hong Kong in 1957.

The next big question was whether William and Simone had children,

as if they had, they would be sole heirs to Peter's estate.

I was able to do an issue search for children of William Dippie,

and I found, again, another consular record,

Corinne was born in 1958 in Hong Kong.

It was a major breakthrough.

If Corinne was still alive, she'd be an heir.

And that wasn't the only good news.

PHONE RINGS

Hello?

Karen's colleagues in the firm's London office

had managed to establish that Corinne had a sister

called Michelle.

And they were able to trace her to South Africa.

It was time for the team to contact their first heir.

Have you?!

Right, right.

It's always a big moment for any heir hunter.

When I first started in this career,

I was really nervous about phoning heirs

because I felt it was very personal, and very intrusive.

I quickly realised that people like talking about their families.

You have taken time to get in touch with them.

Take care, cheers now.

Bye.

For Peter's niece, Michelle, the call was a bolt out of the blue.

I was shocked. Completely shocked.

Because I thought he'd died at least a decade or two previously,

so I found out from the company through mail.

I thought, what's this?

And then I opened it up,

and it was informing me that Uncle Peter had passed away,

and that they were trying to trace the family members.

Michelle and her sister Corinne grew up in South Africa,

before settling in Britain,

and now they were able to help Karen fill in the gaps

in the family story,

including what had happened to their father, William.

We moved out to Zambia, and we lived there for many years.

And unfortunately...

Daddy was killed in a shooting accident when he was out hunting.

Then my mother remarried a South African

and we ended up going to South Africa.

With the paternal side,

there was no contact at all because they were estranged,

and my father never ever spoke about his family at all,

and neither did my mother.

In fact, it was only when we got to South Africa

-that she wrote to...

-Peterina.

-Yes, and said, you know, to tell her.

Then she started up the correspondence with us,

and she used to send us birthday cards and Christmas cards

-and what have you.

-Yes.

-So we got to know her a very little bit, then.

And it was like, ooh, this secret side about this family, you know,

the more people clam up about it, the more you want to know.

Michelle and Corinne had always been interested in finding out

more about their family history,

and had tried looking for Peter before.

I had the address,

and I kept going on the internet and trying all these various sites,

you know, trying to track him down and what have you.

And I had a phone number at one stage that was on some...

directory listing.

But there was no answer.

There was nothing, it was like a disconnected number,

so that was a dead end.

And everything came to just that house in Kelty,

and I couldn't get any further than that,

and then of course Mum had said to me that he'd moved from there.

But it turned out the sisters had been tantalisingly close

to finding their uncle, as they'd the right address all along.

-Definitely a shock.

-A relief, yes.

When we heard he was at the same address, I couldn't believe that.

He was here the whole time, we could have contacted him!

I thought, why didn't I pursue it further?

But it was because I was so convinced that he wasn't there

any more.

I was relieved as well,

because it wasn't that I was always thinking of him every day,

but every now and again, I thought, "Mm, I wonder..."

-..what happened? Yeah.

-Yeah.

Today, Corinne and Michelle are looking through items of Peter's

that came from his house.

I feel like a child at Christmas.

I just want to rip it open and have a look and see.

This is our parents.

-See how handsome he looks in his dress uniform.

-A very handsome man.

I think I'm more curious than anything else.

I just want to devour everything.

-It is exciting, isn't it?

-Very.

-That's you!

-Yeah.

-I was a year old there.

-Yeah.

Having a bath in the sink.

In the kitchen sink, along with the milk bottles.

LAUGHTER

But Peter's collection of photos

isn't quite what the sisters were expecting to see.

It was very surprising to find

that Peter had so many pictures of my sister and I,

and also my parents.

We had no idea that my mother had sent him those pictures.

With Corinne and Michelle the sole beneficiaries

to their Uncle Peter's estate, Karen's research was complete.

There's a value of knowing about the person passing away

and they get a bit of closure from it,

and hopefully find out some background about them,

but of course, it's satisfying,

to know that somebody is going to get a substantial sum of money,

and sometimes a life-changing sum of money.

And who wouldn't be satisfied by giving somebody that news?

Spurred on by the discovery of their long-lost uncle,

Corinne and Michelle are now determined to find out more

about their family.

We are going to see how far back we can go!

I mean, it would be really interesting to see,

have we always been from Scotland?

It's just nice to know, and also to pass on.

Like, knowing our children are interested,

and that their children will know.

It just gives you a real good sense of who you are, I think.

And, on the waterways of Scotland, Peter will always be remembered.

You sort of miss the banter and...

..some of the silly things he'd done,

or some of the things he would say.

And you think well... Yeah, you do miss him a bit.