Lee/Allen Heir Hunters

Heir hunters track down the families of people who died without leaving a will.

They hand over thousands of pounds to long lost relatives

who had no idea they were in line for a windfall.

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme, have the heir hunters met their match chasing leads all over the world?

Can Frasers get a crucial breakthrough on a £300,000 case

that has already taken two years' worth of research?

One of these cases which I so much want to solve, just to say, "Yeah, I've done it."

And we reveal the story of a millionairess

who lived an intriguing double life that kept all the heir hunters guessing about who she really was.

It was all a lie, but I suppose the more lies you tell,

the more lies you need to tell to keep the whole lie going.

Plus, a list of unclaimed estates held by the Treasury.

Could you be on the list?

Could you have thousands of pounds heading your way?

More than two thirds of people die without leaving a will.

If they have no obvious relatives, their money goes to the Government,

who last year made a staggering £18 million from unclaimed estates.

That's where the heir hunters step in.

There are more than 30 heir-hunting companies in the UK

who make it their business to track down the rightful kin.

Last year alone, they claimed back over £6.5 million

for heirs who would otherwise have gone empty-handed.

Fraser and Fraser is one of the oldest firms of heir hunter in Britain.

It's run by Andrew, Charles and Neil Fraser.

We really are the Robin Hood of the modern world, the fairy godfather who comes around.

We take money off the Crown and we give it to the rightful beneficiaries,

so giving it back out to the poorer population, compared to obviously the Crown.

Even Robin Hoods need to make a profit nowadays,

and the heir-hunting companies earn their money

by taking a cut of the inheritance they unite with the relatives.

In its 30-year history, it's tracked down over 50,000 heirs

entitled to a whopping sum of over £100 million.

At Fraser and Fraser, it's the morning case review meeting.

Yeah, all of them, I think, should have gone through.

The team are going over their outstanding cases,

reviewing the evidence to see if they can brainstorm their way forward.

We didn't get the probate till late, we showed the brother...

While a large number of cases come from the Treasury's list of unclaimed estates,

many others are referred.

These cases come from solicitors, or even other firms, when they can't take a case any further.

Often when a case is referred, we're expecting some sort of difficulty

which has caused the problem which the person referring the case to us

has encountered which has stopped them from moving it forwards.

So, yes, we're anticipating a challenge of some sort, and it's being able

to deal with that and bring it to a successful conclusion. That's one of the thrills of the job, really.

In 2006, the company were referred the Lee case.

Elfie Lee died in 2005, aged 92.

She left no will and her estate went unclaimed.

She'd worked for most of her life in London, but since the late '60s,

she lived in the leafy suburb of Cheam, Surrey.

With no known relatives, her property was sold and developed into flats.

Her estate, worth around £300,000, was then transferred to the Treasury.

Right from the start, this case proved tricky.

On Elfie's maternal side, the researchers found themselves investigating a family

with a long colonial history,

while on the paternal side, records for her father seem to have disappeared.

After searching all of their usual lines of investigation, no birth,

death of marriage certificates for Frank Wynford could be found.

At the moment, we think he died between 1911 and 1932.

We don't know where in the world he died, we don't know where he married the mother of the deceased.

It could well be overseas.

So we don't know anything about him.

If Elfie's father did live abroad, it might explain why he's proving so difficult to track down.

But the company have done a huge amount of research

into foreign records and are still drawing a blank.

In most cases, we would expect to find the first beneficiary within the first 48 hours of research.

So 48 hours to two-and-a-half years is considerably longer than we would like to.

We certainly need a break.

To track down any heirs, the team need to piece together

a family tree, working out generation by generation

who the relatives are, and if any are still alive.

Tracking down heirs can be a painstaking process,

and the team know that the slightest fragment of information can sometimes be the key.

And with £300,000 at stake, any avenue is worth looking at.

For the last year of her life, Elfie lived in a nursing home.

With no new leads, Neil has asked the home

to make one further check to see if Elfie had any special visitors.

We've asked the home, the home where Elfie lived for the last year of her life,

if they could look back through their visitors' book,

and most homes keep fairly substantial records of everyone who comes to visit the deceased.

If they could look through their visitors' book and see if she had any visitors

and who they are and how they're put down as associated to them. They've come up with three names.

They say these three names are Elfie's best friends.

Talking to friends of the deceased is one of the best ways of mining valuable family information.

With this fresh lead, Neil wastes no time in sending someone out to talk to Elfie's friends.

Frasers employs travelling heir hunters who are ready to go wherever the hunt takes them.

Their job is to sniff out new clues and follow new leads.

Ex-police officer Bob Barrett is used to investigating difficult cases.

His detective skills come in handy when trying to ferret out any clues in heir-hunting puzzles.

Today he's arranged to meet Elfie's friend Catherine McGeehan, who knew her for almost 40 years.

He hopes she may be able to shed some light on the family.

Most people know something about their friends

and about where their friends' families have come from, etc.

So it's a matter of trying to prize a bit of information out of them that they may not think relevant.

So what I often try and do is just get them to talk about...

their friend without being too specific,

and then perhaps

if in a conversation, something crops up, I can sort of hone in on it

and be a bit more specific.

The pressure's on for Bob to unearth something to help this case,

as the team desperately need a breakthrough.

Although there's a large estate at stake, Neil knew from day one

that he was going to have his work cut out finding the heirs to Elfie's fortune.

Having ended her days in Cheam, she started her life abroad.

We haven't got a birth certificate cos she was born in Egypt.

Now, whereas in England and Wales, we have a central bureau for...

the registration of births, deaths and marriages, it means it doesn't matter if you were born

in Swansea, Cardiff, Liverpool, London, Plymouth,

we can look in the same book and we can find out your birth.

We can index that and apply for your birth certificate.

Egypt is a different story again.

In fact, quite a lot of the stuff is not recorded,

particularly if you're a colonial birth in an Arab society, why should you?

Foreign births are problematic, but the researchers don't give up easily.

The team's persistence paid off with a breakthrough

with the maternal family name that Elfie carried in the form of a middle name, Uniacke.

Although the surname on the maternal side is Coxen, they have a hyphenated surname,

and the first part of that is Uniacke.

That's come down through the grandfather, and he used the surname Uniacke-Coxen,

and all of his births, which we've been able to find out, are indexed under that.

Making a link between her middle name and her mother's maiden name is a brilliant piece of research.

It takes them straight to the grandfather, John Uniacke-Coxen,

and opens up the whole of the mother's side of the family.

Unlike on the paternal side, where they couldn't take it anywhere,

on the maternal side, they have a great name and can make quick progress.

We can't find the birth for the deceased, but we were able to find

some information on her mother, and indeed,

from her mother, we've expanded out quite a lot through the aunts and uncles.

And I think we've found eight or nine aunts and uncles born throughout the world.

With these new records in hand, Neil could start building the crucial family tree.

Stemming from Elfie's maternal grandfather, John Uniacke-Coxen,

they have managed to find eight children, including Elfie's mother Florence.

The birth certificates of Elfie's aunts and uncles show that they were born in exotic places,

from Algeria to Sudan, and Neil thinks he knows the reason why.

It's quite interesting when we look at the ages of the aunts and uncles

and where they were born. It follows the spread of the Eastern Telegraph Company,

and how they turned into Cable and Wireless, which is a global company now

and occupies pretty much all of the telegraph,

telegram and telecommunications throughout the world.

Originally founded from part of the Eastern Telegraph Company,

of which the grandfather was one of the pioneers.

The telegraph system revolutionised the world of communications in the middle of the 19th century.

Electrical messages sent along wires using Morse Code meant that information

could suddenly travel vast distances in a very short amount of time.

It was a huge leap forward from written letters,

spending weeks or even months on ships, trains and horse carts.

Despite the vast expense involved, the advance in this technology

was prolific, and within just a few decades, cables were laid across the world, often on sea beds.

The focal point for all this technology,

and the busiest centre in the world, was Porthcurno in Cornwall.

It ran 14 cables in total, including both the transatlantic cable to Europe,

and also the eastern cable running to Bombay.

It was this last cable that John Uniacke-Coxen worked on,

an absolutely crucial communications system for the running of the British Empire.

Here at Porthcurno, after the first cable in 1870

which connected with Gibraltar and made the final link to Bombay,

a number of cables were also brought in, and at its peak,

around about 1900, there were about 14 major cables coming into Porthcurno.

It was probably the most important communications centre in the world.

It was certainly the biggest telegraph station in the world.

Whilst this new means of communication was vastly quicker

than the postal system, it was still quite a time-consuming operation.

It was a very laborious process and it took a long time

because somebody actually had to unscramble it at each end.

You'd probably have half a dozen at each station,

so to send that message, we're talking about nearly 50 people.

Born in 1855, John Uniacke-Coxen began working

for the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1871 at the age of 16.

OK, this is the staff records of the Eastern Telegraph Company,

and the earliest ones date from the 1870s, where we should find John Coxen.

The Eastern Telegraph Company kept records of all of their employees,

and Alan has been able to dig out John Uniacke-Coxen's unique employment record.

John Coxen.

We can see from his salary that he makes considerable progress through promotions,

and each promotion is usually by means of moving to a new posting.

He takes a massive pay rise when he moves to Suez.

You can see that your career would advance

by taking these postings in other locations. This was the way to get promoted.

By the time he is actually at Suakin here, he's appointed superintendent and he's on £400 a year.

By moving from post to post, John Uniacke-Coxen was able

to earn a salary equivalent to almost £40,000 a year today.

It's hardly surprising they became such a globe-trotting family.

Unfortunately, the staff records from the early period are fairly rudimentary.

It gives indications of the stations he was posted to and his salary, but nothing more

about the reasons why he may have moved, or any indication that his family's moved.

Unfortunately, his staff record gives no indication of the birth of the children.

But the lack of family records at the museum hasn't held the heir hunters back.

Neil's team of experienced researchers have scoured the foreign records office

and amazingly have tracked down all the births from around the world of John Uniacke-Coxen's children,

but despite having completed the mammoth task of building a worldwide family tree,

the team have discovered that each branch except for one has died without living children.

For such a large family, this is extremely uncommon,

and after all the painstaking research is exasperating for the team.

The frustrating bit now is where we haven't been able to take it any further.

We've killed them all off, all but one.

Finding out what happened to Edward could break this case,

and crucially, if he has any descendants, they would be rightful heirs to Elfie Lee's estate.

For Frasers, all hope now rests with Bob Barrett.

Will his detective skills unearth the missing clues

to stop the Treasury keeping her £300,000 fortune?

That one vital clue which suddenly reveals family history

is what heir hunters work tirelessly to find, over months and sometimes years.

Many cases uncover unknown family stories,

but it's not often that these cases involve a high society millionairess with an intriguing double life.

When Dorothea Allen's name appeared in the Bona Vacantia list

of unclaimed estates on the 21st of June 1990,

all the probate firms in the country were hot on the case.

It was immediately clear that her fortune was in the millions,

so the race was on to find any rightful heirs.

Suffolk solicitor Tony Mitchell from Mitchell and Co became involved with the case.

Working alongside an amateur genealogist he took up the challenge

of trying to solve the mystery, but very soon after beginning, Tony ran into difficulties.

In the case of most deaths there is a will, or if there's not a will

there are relatives, and therefore it's easy to trace everybody.

This case was totally different.

Initial investigations with those who knew the deceased led to a believed maiden name of Farquharson,

and a birth date in Scotland of 1901.

But after scouring the Scottish records,

no birth certificate for a Dorothea Farquharson could be found.

A search of records in England and in Wales also drew a blank.

Every single birth in the UK is registered, so to not find any record at all was extremely odd,

and the first sign that all was not as it appeared.

There clearly was intrigue. It was an unusual case and one of the first that I handled of this nature.

High society millionairess Dorothea Allen died in 1990 at the age of 95.

For the last 20 years of her life she'd lived as a semi recluse at her home, Sutton Brailes.

This 28-roomed manor house, set in the sleepy Warwickshire countryside,

was to form the bulk of her unclaimed estate.

Finding rightful heirs to this vast fortune was vital, and the

starting place for Heir Hunters is often neighbours of the deceased.

Alfred Woodward, now in his 80s, has first hand recollections of Dorothea.

As a boy he lived only three miles away from the Allen manor.

Well, the first time I saw Dorothea Allen she stood absolutely out,

she was like a film actress.

The most expensive clothes that money could buy,

and Rolls Royce cars to ride in, it was absolutely breathtaking really.

Then when I was about 12 years of age, standing on the footpath in Brailes.

At that time in the 1930s cars were very few and far between.

To see a magnificent Rolls Royce just come through the village several times a day

was really something out of the ordinary.

And Dorothea's achievements were out of the ordinary too.

This glamorous wealthy lady amassed her million pound fortune from a hugely successful business.

Dorothea founded Spencer Corsets in Britain in 1926,

with her business partner and husband Robert Allen.

Getting into the corsetry business was an extremely shrewd move, as these garments

would have been an essential part of every woman's wardrobe.

It would have been unthinkable not to own a corset.

They supported the figure, hid the bulges, created a flattering figureline under your clothes,

and most importantly, held up your stockings.

To get the Spencer message across, Dorothea employed an army of corseteers,

who were trained to measure, fit and persuade ladies that you

simply weren't properly dressed if you didn't wear a Spencer, although ironically, Dorothea never did.

The best selling model was the Spen-All, and by 1931,

Dorothea and Robert's business was employing over 3,000 factory workers.

NEWSREEL: And the RAF kept on firing.

These two men with wings, alone in the sky...

Even during the war years, business boomed, as Spencers

turned their hand to making a special type of corset for the RAF.

The G Suit was a body belt designed to relieve the effects of gravity

on airmen travelling at high speeds.

-Any planes, Johnny?

-A 109 destroyed, yes.

Glen Murphy became interested in Dorothea's life in the late 1990s.

He started researching her remarkable past.

It helped to build a lifestyle for her at that time,

during the 1920s and '30s, that was beyond most people's dreams.

She had several homes, she dined at the best restaurants, she knew

all the most famous people on both sides of the Atlantic at the time,

and she had a very good time.

One would assume that such a wealthy lady and smart business woman would

have made a will, particularly as she possessed such a large estate.

The fact that she'd made quite a name for herself in industry

and she didn't make a will, it didn't seem to gel, I mean why?

Lots of questions came out, why did she do that?

Every inch of Sutton Brailes Manor was searched, but nothing was found.

Government officials trying to wind up her estate admitted they hadn't found a single relative,

her place of birth, or even when she was married.

Nine months later, despite the lack of heirs,

Dorothea's manor house and all her possessions were put up for sale at auction.

The Treasury Solicitor was in control, and quite properly they have a duty to sell all assets that

were owned in this case by Dorothea Allen, to turn everything into cash,

and then hold it until beneficiaries come forward.

Everything from 17th century furniture to her collection of classic cars were up for grabs.

The house sale raised over half a million pounds.

Dorothea's vast collection of jewellery sold for almost £400,000,

and her black 1972 Rolls Royce Corniche convertible

sold for a further £66,000.

The cash being held by the Treasury was mounting,

but the most intriguing information was found when the house was cleared after the sale.

The passport and photo documentation had been mutilated,

so it's impossible really, to positively identify who she was.

Throughout her lifetime she'd gone to great trouble

not to be photographed, leaving very few remaining images.

But the discovery of mutilated photographs now pointed to something else -

a deliberate attempt to conceal her identity.

It suddenly became clear why they were having so much trouble finding Dorothea's relatives.

Part of the problem was that she didn't want anybody to know where she'd come from.

She didn't want anybody to know her true background,

because it didn't fit in with her lifestyle at the time.

It appeared that Dorothea Allen had covered her tracks extremely well.

It was now down to the heir hunters to do some real detective work

if they were ever to unravel her secrets.

For every case that is solved, there are still those that stubbornly remain a mystery.

Currently over 3,000 names drawn from across the country

are on the Treasury's unsolved case list.

Their assets will be kept for up to 30 years,

in the hope that eventually someone will remember and come forward to claim their inheritance.

With estates valued at anything from £5000 to millions of pounds,

the rightful heirs are out there somewhere.

Anthony Clarke of Peterlee, County Durham, died in September 2006.

Does his name stir any memories?

Perhaps you lived in the same town.

Could you even be in line to inherit his estate?

Anthony John Evans of Paddington in London died in December 2007.

Does his name ring a bell?

Could you be his closest relative, and entitled to his unclaimed estate?

The ongoing unsolved case of Elfie Lee is one that heir hunting firm,

Fraser and Fraser are desperate to solve.

They've been chasing leads for almost three years, since her death in 2005.

They need to find living heirs to inherit,

otherwise the Treasury will take all of Elfie's £300,000 fortune.

The team have traced all but one uncle on the maternal side,

uncovering births all around the world,

just to find out that seven of his siblings have no living heirs.

The aunts and uncles which we have been able to find

on the maternal side are spread throughout the colonial world, in Africa, in India, in Malta.

I've never seen a family like it, and normally when you're dealing with quite a large family of eight

children you would expect there to be a second generation also quite large

of maybe 15, 20, and then if we can't find any of them, take them down to 30 odd.

In this case we've got two cousins, one of them's the deceased,

and they both died without having any children.

Only Elfie's uncle Edward hasn't been found, and if he has any living

descendants, they would be in line for a share of the fortune.

With heirs so thin on the ground, finding out what happened to Elfie's uncle Edward is crucial.

The team's persistence has uncovered a global family tree.

Elfie's grandfather spent most of his life abroad, working in undersea telegraphy.

Further investigation into the records of the Eastern Telegraph Company in Porthcurno, Cornwall,

revealed that Edward followed in his father's footsteps.

His son's record is also quite brief and there's not really enough

evidence from that to speculate about why he would have left the service.

He may have actually gone to work for another company, I mean, that was quite a usual thing to happen.

This was about 1909.

It's difficult to guess where he might have gone, we haven't got any records

so whether he remained in undersea telegraphy or not is unclear.

The records may be brief, but they do at least confirm that Edward didn't die in infancy,

and that leaves the real possibility of descendants.

What happens to Elfie's £300,000 estate

now depends on what Bob Barrett can uncover from a face to face inquiry.

The office have found an old friend of Elfie's.

I'd be interested in finding out anything that Catherine knows about Elfie and her life,

because sometimes little things that seem insignificant

can actually give you just the clue you're looking for.

There's one uncle we've not killed off, as we say,

we don't know, we know he was born, we know nothing else about him.

Bob has arranged to meet Catherine McGeehan, Elfie's friend for over 40 years.

He's looking for any clues about Elfie's uncle Edward.

I understand that you were good friends with Elfie.

Very good friend. I know her from 1963.

-Did you?

-Yes.

-Oh, good heavens, that is a long while, isn't it?

-It was a long while.

There was an uncle. She never spoke of an uncle Edward to your knowledge?

Not to my knowledge, no, I would have remembered that because...

-Oh, she mentioned two cousins in Rhodesia.

-Right.

One of the people was a relative, the mother of those children was some relative.

-Right.

-She did tell me that, but she used to post parcels to

Rhodesia to those children and to her friend, and she told me she had died.

-So she never, she never mentioned any names?

-Unfortunately, no.

Or what the relationship was?

Well, because the mother of the boys was a cousin.

-So that's...

-What side that was from I have no idea.

So could well mean that...

it was from her mother's side.

Well, let's hope we can find some relatives so the government doesn't get all her money anyway.

You know, it really is sad when you think about it.

Bob has managed to tease out a potentially useful clue with the discovery of family in Zimbabwe.

But will it be enough to lead the team back in London to Elfie's heirs in fortune?

-CAR PHONE BEEPS Hello, mate.

-Hi, Neil.

-Just to let you know, I've been to see Mrs McGeehan.

-Yeah.

She is fairly convinced that there was a couple of cousins in Rhodesia,

and two sons from one of the cousins, so...

But they don't know which side of the family?

We don't know which side of the family, yeah, and they've got no names, I'm afraid.

Don't know whereabouts in Rhodesia, or...?

No, no, she didn't know a town.

-OK.

-So, sorry not to ring you with more than that.

That's not a problem, it's more than we had before, so...

OK.

We'll have another attack on it. OK.

-Cheers now.

-Speak to you soon.

-Bye.

The discovery of two potential relatives in Zimbabwe is certainly another clue to work on.

But will it be enough to crack the case that has floored Neil for over two years?

At the moment, I'm struggling to see where the cousin's going to fit in,

if it's a Uniacke-Coxen, which means it could come off Edward, the most missing uncle,

or if it's on a Wynford, and along if it's a male stem of Wynford then

we may be able to follow that through the directories or some of the books.

I don't know what the records are going to be like in Zimbabwe.

It probably was quite good when it was still a colony,

but I don't think it'll be very good any more.

It will be incredibly hard to track these relatives down,

but with over £300,000 at stake, for Neil, it's worth a shot.

I've just sent it over to South Africa.

The good thing that's going with it, we've got very good names,

Wynford, Uniacke and Coxen, they're all very good names.

But I'm asking for someone to search for a needle in a haystack.

Just trying to find a name from the whole population to see if we can find where those cousins are.

This could be the last throw of the dice for Neil in the search for the missing heir.

I've got my fingers crossed, I'm hoping that it may come to something,

but it really is last chance saloon.

The case of Elfie Lee has been a tough one for Frasers.

They've been working on it for over three years.

The hunt has taken them from London to Cornwall,

and now through Egypt, Sudan and Algeria to Southern Africa.

Sadly the extreme difficulty in searching for records in Zimbabwe means that the investigations

have so far not revealed any heirs, and the case of Elfie Lee remains unsolved.

Someone out there may know something which could be the vital key to unlocking Elfie's fortune,

but if a breakthrough doesn't come soon, only the Treasury will benefit from her £300,000.

Unsolved cases are the bane of Heir Hunters' lives,

especially when there are millions of pounds at stake,

and a healthy commission to be earned.

The case of Dorothea Allen was particularly frustrating.

The Dorothea Allen case is probably the most involved

that I've ever handled.

The corsetry millionairess was not who she claimed to be, and unlocking the mystery

of her true identity was stumping every probate firm in the country.

Almost four years had gone by since her million pound fortune had been

advertised on the Treasury's list of unclaimed estates.

It seemed Dorothea was going to succeed in taking her secrets to the grave.

But it didn't stop a rush of claims coming in to solicitor, Tony Mitchell.

I would think we've had probably 40 or 50 false claims

throughout the period of the administration.

A lot of people with similar names or some connection with the corset

industry or things like this,

claimed that they were entitled to some or all of the money.

Particularly from America, various people would write to me.

There were articles in probably six or seven English newspapers,

and that in itself prompted people to write to me

who thought they might have a case to claim against the estate.

Each claim was a potential lead, and was investigated fully.

The press coverage intended to help the case in fact added hundreds of hours of unnecessary work.

With so many dead ends and false leads, it seemed that they would never solve the case.

Tony Mitchell felt sure that Dorothea was living

under a false identity, but he still couldn't prove it.

He needed to find someone who knew her from her younger days,

and the huge publicity created by the case was to do just that.

On seeing a picture, a former suitor was in no doubt

as to her true identity, and contacted Tony Mitchell.

Cedric Bowell recognised Dorothea from a photograph

which had been found in her possessions at her home.

He recognised her as somebody he used to go out with,

in the sense of going for picnics primarily.

When he came forward to us he recognised the person

as Dora Brammer, not Dorothea Allen.

Of course, that's the name that he knew her under.

Finding Dorothea's true maiden name, Brammer, was the breakthrough they'd been waiting for.

It began to unravel the real identity of Dorothea Allen, one she had tried to conceal all her life.

And while Cedric's evidence regarding

her name was being verified, another piece of the jigsaw fell into place.

There is a photograph of couple standing outside a church

found amongst her possessions after she died, and it wasn't known, it wasn't apparent who they were,

though it's thought they may have been her parents.

And so it was advertised in the local press in Yorkshire,

and it's through the photograph that people recognised who they were,

they identified them as the Brammers, and they said

that they were the parents of Dora Brammer,

and that helped to link Dora Brammer to Dorothea Allen, and it's one of

the clinching things that helped to put the whole jigsaw together.

A link had been unearthed between Dora Brammer and Dorothea Allen,

but it was still not enough to convince the Treasury that they were one and the same.

It was to be Dorothea's lifelong love of Rolls Royces that was to give the final clue,

and prove beyond doubt that she really was Dora Brammer.

I think that was one of the critical pieces of evidence that convinced

the Treasury's solicitor that Dora Brammer was Dorothea Allen.

Dorothea Allen had a Rolls Royce,

we contacted the Rolls Royce Enthusiasts' Club,

who confirmed its registration number and also its chassis number.

Its registration number was also found in one of the beneficiaries'

mother's address book with a note that it was Dora Brammer's car.

It was during a rare family visit that Dorothea made in her Rolls Royce that the note had been made.

Years later we were able to match the registration number

to an actual car she owned through her driving license, which were all found in her house after her death.

That little note, made over 40 years ago

in a personal address book, was the final proof of Dorothea's deception.

If one put all of this evidence together it's quite clear

that Dora Brammer and Dorothea Allen are one and the same.

Her double identity was revealed at last.

Finally, Dorothea or Dora's genuine relatives could be identified.

Her parents were Amos and Emily Brammer, and Dora had two brothers, Clement and Lawrence.

The family originally were from a terraced house in Sheffield, where Amos worked as a steel forgeman.

But why had she lied about this upbringing?

She came from Sheffield in the 1920s, which was quite a grim place.

It was full of steelworks and steel cutlery firms.

It's a very dirty industrial city, and she went to live in a very different life,

with a manor house in the country and homes in New York and London,

and it was she had to build up a whole pretence around that lifestyle

to make it seem that she was born into that lifestyle and she'd not

achieved it through her own hard work and industry.

This information proved that Dorothea

had not only lied about her name, age, and maiden name, but there was one final twist to her charade.

It now turned out that her 40 year marriage was also a sham.

Robert Allen, the love of her life, was already married to Gladys Hudson when he met Dorothea.

He left Gladys and their young daughter to live with her and to start the business.

But he never divorced Gladys, and he never married Dorothea.

For four decades Dorothea and Robert fooled everyone with their pretence.

They had to set up a new life for themselves as Mr and Mrs Allen,

which was a complete lie.

So I suppose if you tell one enormous lie in your life it's

quite easy to go ahead and start telling other lies as well.

Then came the lie about her, the fact that her parents were quite

well off, and her father had been in the army, quite a

high ranking officer in the army.

It was all a lie, but I suppose the more lies you tell,

the more lies you need to tell to keep the whole lie going.

It had taken eight years to finally unmask Dorothea as Sheffield-born

Dora Brammer, but it was now possible for Tony Mitchell to find Dora's genuine heirs.

As her brothers had both died young with no offspring, the net was cast

wider to the brothers and sisters of Dora's parents, Amos and Emily.

The trail would continue through Dora's aunts and uncles and their descendants.

Finding and tracking down all the heirs however was no mean feat, in fact it took a further three years.

It was extremely difficult, particularly as there were 104 beneficiaries,

most of them were in England, there were one or two in Australia,

and it took a long time to trace everybody.

Her cousin in Sheffield and 104 other relatives were traced,

and Glen Murphy as a first cousin twice removed was one of them.

When I was first contacted, it was through a phone call,

and my first initial reaction was disbelief.

I found it hard to believe that anybody within the family would have

left anything of note, certainly not an intestate estate worth quite a lot of money.

It was only after making one or two inquiries within the family

when I found out the true extent of the inheritance,

it was over a million pounds initially that had been released, that I began to believe it.

I felt surprised and incredulous about it all because it was complete shock.

The numerous beneficiaries received different amounts depending

on how closely related they were to Dorothea.

At the bottom end, we're talking about £1,000 a beneficiary.

Probably the greatest one was £37,000, which was payable to

somebody who was almost of the same age as Dorothea Allen.

The money side of it was secondary I have to say, because what was better was to find out

about the family history and to meet members of the family who we probably wouldn't have met otherwise.

That was the real legacy I think that Dorothea left us all.

But Glen did hold onto one little memento of the great lady.

One of the more personal items amongst her possessions

was a driving license which I kept, and it was quite nice to have that, because it was, it was her license

which she kept for many years, it dates from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, and she signed it.

So that's a little personal reminder of her, which I've kept.

And it's that fake ID that the heirs still have to be thankful for.

Because who knows, without the success of the

bogus Dorothea Allen, Dora Brammer may never have made her fortune.

If you would like advice about building a family tree

or making a will, go to bbc.co.uk.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd